Congrats Julianne!

Attending ASCB|EMBO? Join us for a Special Interest Subgroup on Sensory Receptors, featuring @EGouaux15625 @RachelleGaudet Maude Baldwin @MPIforBI Juan Du @DuLuLabs @CoreyAHAllard and Eric Mulhall, co-organized with Paul Garrity @Nemvec @ASCBiology @EMBO #cellbio2024

How do mosquitoes find people to bite & places to lay eggs? Turns out, sensing water vapor is key. In new work we (Tang et al.) ID mosquito receptors for dry/moist air. KO'ing them drops blood feeding and renders females unable to find water to lay eggs.

Ava Towle '26 studies how fruit flies sense temperature through G-Protein Coupled Receptors in the Shapiro Science Center lab, highlighting some of the exciting research on campus this summer. #Research #Brandeis 📸 Gaelen Morse/Staff photographer

My autobiography is now published on the @NobelPrize website. It covers both my personal and professional life, highlighting the decisions and events that have had the biggest impact. I appreciate the opportunity to tell my story. Hope you enjoy reading it https://t.co/G0BRNCzNkH

Sugar detection in 3D: Structure of an insect gustatory receptor

Now out in final form: Structural basis of ligand specificity and channel activation in an insect gustatory receptor (w/ our collaborators in the Gaudet lab) https://t.co/IIAlTO9ZZU

Friday's retreat of the Center for Molecular Investigation of Neurological Disorders brought together neuroscientists and related researchers from UP and @PennStHershey with guests like keynote speaker @Nemvec. See all the pics on our Flickr album: https://t.co/lsgn3D6ru0

Sad news: John DeModena, long-time tech w/@wormraiserand friend to so many of us, has passed. Demo’s generosity of spirit and enthusiasm for life were inspiring. There will be a celebration of Demo’s life 1/27 in the Morgan library

@RachelleGaudet @HC2EM

For GR fans: Signature motif residues (TYhhhhhQF) make specific contributions to pore helix: T helps form hydrophilic path; Y binds lipid head group; QF gates pore entrance. Also new: intersubunit fenestrations of both GRs and ORs are inhabited by pore-penetrating lipids. 4/4

Take homes: Unlike known ORs, Gr9’s ligand-binding pocket is larger, solvent accessible and heavy on polar/aromatics. Using structure-based alignments and alphaFold, we leverage this to examine structural and chemical properties of GRs more broadly. 3/4

BmGr9 is a fructose-gated tetramer related to insect Odorant Receptors (ORs). It was beautifully characterized in 2011 by Sato et al., PNAS, and we decided to try and determine its structure. 2/4

Preprint: Structure of an insect gustatory receptor. Heather Frank, Sanket Walujkar, Richard Walsh, Willem Laursen, Doug Theobald, me and Rachelle Gaudet. Collaborative effort 5 years in the making! https://t.co/bgvxw49ACT 1/4

We are back to business! The very first in vivo voltage imaging in Huang lab. Look at how this neuron changes firing mode. This simplistic voltage scope only costs ~$50k, mostly @Thorlabs parts. Let me know if you want a full part-list to build your own one.

University Professor Eve Marder ’69 & Professor Emeritus Gregory Petsko have each received the National Medal of Science from President Biden, the highest recognition the nation bestows on scientists & engineers. https://t.co/Fiy50DhbpV

you can find me over at: @paulgarrity.bsky.social

TIL: “Smell ... was long considered “a primitive sense that wasn’t worth studying by neurobiologists,” says xxx, a physicist at IBM Research. “

Please RT: We have a fully funded PhD project to understand the role of piRNAs in mosquito immunity. Come and do your PhD with us! 🦟🦟 https://t.co/ha2ESqPbfP

Our lab @Brandeis (~Boston) now hiring a Research Tech. We study how flies/mosquitoes sense the world using molbio/genetics. Whether goal is PhD/MD program in ≥2 yrs (recent ex-techs in grad programs at UC Berkeley, UVM, BU, USF) or long-term, contact us.