Dating before marriage! Dr. Gerald Carter on how blood-sharing cooperative behavior evolves among vampire bats.

Cooperation lies at the heart of social behavior. In turn, cooperation depends on trust. Trust that a good dead will be reciprocated with a good dead. But how does such a trust develop among a group of strangers? How can unknown people come together to develop a team.

To investigate the evolution of cooperation, the team of Dr. Gerald Carter at the Ohio State University studies vampire bats. Vampire bats, as the name suggests, feed on blood. Failure to drink blood for three days is enough to kill them. To survive periods of drought, vampire bats have evolved a complex social structure where the fed bats feed the hungry ones. The relationship of food-sharing depends on the trust that the bat which received food today will repay the debt by feeding the hungry ones in future. How does such a trust develop? Dr. Carter's research, posted on bioRxiv, finds that the cooperative behavior develops in small steps, where a grooming behavior precedes food-sharing. The grooming behavior provides the the dating-period before bats enter into the matrimonial bond of blood-sharing. To know more, we interviewed Dr. Carter.


To know more, please refer to:
Development of new food-sharing relationships among nonkin vampire bats
Carter et al., bioRxiv 534321. Posted: Jan. 29, 2019.
This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.

and visit the highly informative website of the Carter Lab.
Videos of vampire bats: https://socialbat.org/videos/
Advice for grad students: https://socialbat.org/2017/07/05/some-advice-for-grad-students/

Do you remember the time when... How episodes shape our memories by Jai Yu!

Imagine sitting with your friends chatting about previous trips. You might mention the time when you went to a beautiful waterfall. You mention some details of the event, like the sun, weather and scenery. You can remember the activities from that day. But would you remember the exact duration you were at the waterfall, apart from a crude number? Or what you did the day earlier or the day later. Probably not so clearly. The event became fresh in your memory, but many details were lost to time. How does the brain retain this experience.

Jai and colleagues investigated the phenomena of coding experiences in the brain to understand how the mind recollects past experiences. They used an interesting model where a rat's behavior is monitored while it searches for a reward and then consumes it. The rat's activity gets divided into mobility (searching for reward) and immobility (consumption of reward). The rat's brain uses the changes in activity as switches to break time into discrete chunks. Each chunk becomes an episode and might be processed and saved differently. This way the brain could define interesting parts of experience and save them as separate memories, such as memories of experience on paths to reach rewards versus memories of being at those reward locations. To know more on how this happens, please listen to Jai.



To know more, please refer to:
Distinct hippocampal-cortical memory representations for experiences associated with movement versus immobility
eLife, Aug., 2017

How deep breaths help with relaxation -- Interview by Kevin Yackle!

The one advice for relaxation is to take deep breaths. Yoga practitioners and doctors alike give this age-old advice. But how does our body connect breathing with calmness? Or is this a placebo effect??

Kevin and colleagues wanted to understand the biological connection between breathing and relaxation. For this, they targeted a specific region in the brain that is involved in controlling breathing. They killed a small region within this special area. Surprisingly, and fortunately, the animal's breathing did not stop. But it was slower, and was connected to the animal being calm under normal conditions! This showed a link between deep, slow breaths and a relaxed state of mind. To know more, please listen to Kevin.



For more information, please refer:
Breathing control center neurons that promote arousal in mice
Yackle et al., Science, 2017

Illuminating movements! Interview on motion control by optogenetics by Patrícia Correia.

Our brain controls our every behavior. This includes our simple everyday movements and our deepest thoughts and feelings. But are the mundane and complex processes connected in some way. Or are they processed in entirely different ways. Could there be a unified framework underneath the spectrum of behaviors.

Patricia and colleagues started by investigating the role of serotonin on mouse brain. Serotonin, a neuro-hormone, has been associated with mood and motivation within our brains. They wanted to understand the effect of providing increased amount of serotonin to mouse brain. They did this by using a technique called optogenetics, which is capable of using light to control cellular behavior. In their case, they used optogentics to increase serotonin levels in the brain. Upon doing this, they found a fascinating effect on the animal's locomotive behavior. This suggested that serotonin can controls our movements, possibly by affecting our motivations to carry them out! To know more, please listen to the interview with Patricia.


To know more, please refer to:

Transient inhibition and long-term facilitation of locomotion by phasic optogenetic activation of serotonin neurons.
Correia et al., eLife 2017;6:e20975

In addition, please have a look at wonderful fusion between art and science by Patricia, Roots of Curiosity, and her podcast, Creative Disturbance.

Beating Monday Morning Blues with Weekend Camping! Interview with Ellen Stothard on regulation of body clock by natural light.

Surely you have bing-watched your favorite series on Netflix, tucked inside a blanket with a hot cup of chocolate during a lazy weekend. We keep our eyes glued to the computer screen deep into the night, and shift bed time. But then comes Monday, and the body wants to remain inside the same warm blanket. Our body clock shifts and it wants to sleep late, and wake up later. Is there any way to reset the body to normal time? Get it refreshed for the week?

Ellen, Andrew and colleagues from University of Colorado find that exposing the body to natural light is an easy fix for the disrupted body rhythm. They find that spending a weekend under artificial light shifts the body clock to a later period, but that such delay can be prevented by weekend camping under natural sunlight. So to all people who feel the blues on Monday, pitch a tent. To know in detail on this phenomena, please listen to Ellen.


For further information, please refer to:
Circadian Entrainment to the Natural Light-Dark Cycle across Seasons and the Weekend
Stothard, McHill et al., Current Biology, 2017

Sex is in the details! Interview with Esther Saiz on gender influencing neuronal circuitry.

'Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.' But what differs between Mars and Venus. According to the author of the book, John Gray, the difference lies in the psyche. These differences could stem from different wiring inside the brain of individual sexes. With 100 billion neurons in the brain of typical human, and maybe as many as 1,000 trillion total connections, its a daunting task to answer this question.

Enter Esther and colleagues with their powerful model system C. elegans, which is a small transparent worm whose each and every cell in the body is accurately mapped along with most of cell's interacting partners. When they looked carefully at one neuron that differed between the sexes in C. elegans, they found a machinery that influenced the sex-specific maturation and behavior of that cell. Strikingly, this influence was not due to sexual hormones, but was wired inside the identity of the cell. So, just changing this one cell changed certain behaviors of the animal from one sex to another! To know more, please listen to Esther.


For further information, please refer to:
Sexually Dimorphic Differentiation of a C. elegans Hub Neuron Is Cell Autonomously Controlled by a Conserved Transcription Factor.
Saiz et al., Current Biology, 2017.
BioRxiv Link.

The Scent of Jealousy! Interview with Meghan Laturney on mate-guarding behavior!!

You know of Hollywood plots where a man comes smelling of another woman, and his wife suspects him of cheating on her. The woman is relying on olfactory cues for keeping a tab on the guy's sexual behavior. Does this soap-opera behavior also occur in other species? Is smell used as a tool to guard against promiscuous behavior??

Meghan and her colleagues try to tease apart such behavior in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. They see that the male deposits specific scents on the female's body and inside her reproductive tract. Both these olfactory cues decrease the female's attractiveness to future mating partners. This increases the chances of the male's sperm fertilizing the female. The female, on the other hand, might actively try to remove these marking scent in order to continuing mating, which gives her eggs better to survive. To know more about this exciting arms race between the sexes, please listen to Meghan!


To know more on the topic, please refer to:
Drosophila melanogaster females restore their attractiveness after mating by removing male anti-aphrodisiac pheromones.
Laturney & Billeter. Nature Communications.  7, 12322 (2016)

What did you have for dinner last night? Interview with Vishnu Sreekumar on memory formation in the real world!

Isn't is difficult to remember what you had for dinner two night ago, but so easy to remember your first kiss! Why is it difficult to remember few experiences while other stay etched in our memory forever. Of course, we have limited brain capacity, so few things are removed at the expense of others, but how do we evaluate that information; how much decision making goes into paying attention to important tasks for remembering them later onward.

Vishnu Sreekumar and his team work on memory formation in the real world. They utilize information gathering using contemporary technologies to come-up with models that can explain what we look for in experiences when memories are being formed. Their exciting work not only helps model our day-to-day working, but can also help people with better memory retention and improving attention span. To know more, please listen to Vishnu.


For further information please refer to the following publication:
The Episodic Nature of Experience: A Dynamical Systems Analysis.
Sreekumar et al., Cognitive Science, 23 July 2016.

Music to the heart! Interview with Troy Shirangi on development of neural circuitry for fly courtship behavior!!

You all must have seen a peacock dance. It's majestic, isn't it! The vibrant colors all moving in big waves, but for what?? The male peacock performs the majestic gesture to lure the female into mating. This is true for many species where the male makes ostentatious displays to entice the female. But how does the male develop the displays that the females respond to? Are there special neural circuitry controlling this behavior?? And if so, which genes are responsible for making them???


Troy and his colleagues dissect such machinery for the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster. They find the neurons and master transcription factor autonomously controlling the courtship behavior. They are able to specially pin-point the neuro-muscular apparatus underlying male singing. The study lays the platform for understanding sex-specific behaviors and the evolutionary forces underlying mate choice. To understand about the exciting work, please listen to the interview with Troy.


For further information, please refer the following study:
Doublesex Regulates the Connectivity of a Neural Circuit Controlling Drosophila Male Courtship Song
Shirangi et al., Developmental Cell, 20 June 2016.
   

Give me food, give me sex; give me that which I desire -- Interview with Yi Li about reward sensing!!

Chocolate, chips, cigarettes, alcohol, sex; well, we all choose our sins. What is making us crave for such desires, and what happens when we finally achieve them. Yi Li in his exciting study published in Nature Communications shows that serotonergic neurons in the dorsal raphea nucleus in brain might be involved in reward and pleasure behavior. He did this by observing and recording neuronal activity in live, uninhibited mice while they seek food, sucrose, social interaction and even sex. We call him to hear more about this exciting study.   

You can read the original article here: 

Serotonin neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus encode reward signals

Li et al., Nature Communications 7, 10503, January, 2016.