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This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.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/

Alternative for longer life! Syed Shamsh Tabrez on how alternative splicing increases lifespan during dietary restriction.

Celebrating 100th birthday in good health! Who doesn't want that. With modern medicine, more and more people are living longer and healthier lives. And diet plays a major role in helping us live longer. Scientific evidence points more and more towards a low-calorie diet leading to increase in lifespan. But eating less to restrict calories is so tough! Everyone wants to have an ice-cream at the end of the day. Is it possible to eat indulgent food and still extend lifespan?

Tabrez and colleagues wanted to understand the basic biological changes that occur with dietary restriction. Illuminating the underlying principles would help harnessing them for increasing lifespan. They found that during dietary restriction, the genetic information processing is altered and this changes the biological landscape of the cells. Such alterations could help cells with efficient energy processing. To know more, please listen to Tabrez.




To know more, please refer to:
Differential alternative splicing coupled to nonsense-mediated decay of mRNA ensures dietary restriction-induced longevity
Tabrez et al., Nature communications, 2017

My heart beats to your tunes only! Kirill Tokarev on how male song promotes monogamy in zebra finch.

You might have seen the reality shows that put multiple bachelors together and it ends up in dramatic cases of cheating and adultery. Mixing attractive people provides a good recipe for amorous behavior. Polygamy should follow in close-knit and passion-filled social environment. However, we do know that individual male-female bonding can arise and be maintained even under such situations. How can monogamy be sustained?

Kirill Tokarev and colleagues used zebra finches as model to understand development of monogamy in a close-knit social structure. Female zebra finches are attracted to the singing of the male song, and in a community, multiple male songs would be heard by the female. Evolution of monogamy would require atleast two conditions:
1. after bonding, females responding to their partner's singing only,
2. to maintain harmony in the society males not being aggressive to other singing males.

How do both these conditions arise in zebra finches? To know that, please listen to Kirill.




To know more, please refer to:
Sexual dimorphism in striatal dopaminergic responses promotes monogamy in social songbirds
Tokarev et al., eLife 2017  

Deux in one! Krista Byers-Heinlein on how bilingual babies comprehend two languages.

We all have a dream to learn that foreign language. Could be French for your love of Paris or French cuisine. Or could be Japanese because of the anime industry. But, its really tough! Isn't it? However, millions of bilingual kids do this so effortlessly. How are they able to achieve this feat, which so many of us find so demanding.

Krista and colleagues study language comprehension in kids to understand how they make sense of a bilingual world. They wanted to know how kids monitor the language they are spoken to. Interestingly, they found an 'expectation' for one language within a single sentence. This suggested that kids efficiently parse information that helps them comprehend and learn multiple languages at the same time. To know more, please listen to Krista.


To know more, please refer to:
Bilingual infants control their languages as they listen
Krista Byers-Heinlein et al., PNAS, 2017   

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

The sugar deception! Interview with Maria Veldhuizen to know if our brain can tricked into uncoupling sweetness from calorie content.

We all know of diet drinks and sugar-free desserts. Such foods have ingredients that are sweet, but low in calorie. The temptation to savor and relish sweet foods without paying the price of high calorie intake is pretty tempting, isn't it? But does taking food items with a mismatch in sweetness and calorie content actually work on our brains? Can our brain detect the disparity?

Maria and colleagues wanted to understand the affect of discrepancy between the sweetness of the food and its calorie content on the brain's response and metabolism. By providing people drinks that were of the same nutritional value, but varying in calorie, they found that the body responded the best when the two things, sweetness and calories, matched. This suggested that calories are not the only factor that trigger metabolic and mental responses. It could be that the brain's reward circuits better register foods that match in their sweetness and nutritional content. This is of great importance because we live in a world where increasing amounts of food contain such mismatches. To know more, please listen to Maria.


To know more, please refer to:
Integration of Sweet Taste and Metabolism Determines Carbohydrate Reward
Maria et al., Current Biology, 2017

Is believing seeing? Interview with Benedikt Ehinger on how humans percieve unreliable information!

We use the information from our senses to make sense of the world. But sometimes, the information can be unreliable. What does our mind do in face of corrupted information?

Benedikt and colleagues wanted to understand how our mind makes sense of the world when faced with unreliable information. They used the model of blind spot, a part of our visual field that does not detect light. Our mind fills-in the blind spot such that we are not aware of its presence. The experiment was set up to find out if we are aware of 'information filling-in', which makes the blind spot a source of unreliable information. Unexpectedly, not only are we not aware of the unreliability of the information, we in-fact prefer the filled-in information from the blind spot over reality. In the words of André Breton, “The imaginary is what tends to become real.” To know more, please listen to Benedikt.


To know more, please refer to:
Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones.
Benedikt Ehinger, et al., eLife, May, 2017