@uwalumni Obviously I love my own university in Maryland, but purple and red state outrage is the only the way to save medical research.

Make no mistake, @uwalumni and UM alums, our great universities will be greatly diminished if we allow this to stand!.

This is necessary to pay teachers, maintain the plumbing, and other essential functions. “Indirect Cost Sharing” from the NIH pays these bills, and around 2/3 of these payments have just been slashed under the new administration.

There are many changes in DC, but this one is going to cripple education and medical research, even though it sounds minor. The @UWMadison and @UMNAlumni , two places I dearly love, will no longer be receiving indirect costs necessary to keep the lights on.

RT @emiliapsantos: So happy to see this work out in the word!! Congrats @marconi_aleks and @gregverne!! #proudPI.

RT @joshuasweitz: It's publication day for "Asymptomatic" via @JHUPress. The book explores the paradox of asymptomatic transmission and rat….

RT @UMDscience: Biology's Dawei Han and Catherine Carr discovered an auditory "sixth sense" in geckos that could have implications for huma….

Lots more to unpack: How do sexually dimorphic signals regulate the processing of these olfactory signals? What are the central pathways receiving this pheromonal information? We’ve got a lot left to do!.

Is olfactory receptor evolution a common pathway by which social systems evolve? We don’t know yet, but cichlid fish are an ideal system, with their behavioral variation and experimental tractability.

We also looked at one of the few cichlid species where males are the primary caregivers, the blackchin tilapia. Incredibly, they carry a deleterious mutation in or113a as well!

Similar to findings in mice from @DulacLab, @Lab_Tali_Kimchi, @yohisogai, males have an intact parental behavior circuit, but its activation is gated by sensory cues.

The inability of a male to sense the female fertility pheromone disinhibits males from collecting eggs during spawning! And these males aren’t simply eating the eggs; many of them mouthbrood for hours to weeks.

But Cheng-Yu found *male* or113a and cnga2b mutant animals carrying eggs! This is never observed in any of our cichlids in the lab, nor has it ever been reported in the wild for any haplochromine cichlid.

And here’s the PLOT TWIST! For most cichlid fish species, only females have parental behavior. Females carry the developing embryos in their mouths for 2 weeks until they’re free-swimming, a behavior called “mouthbrooding”. Best performed by Isabella Rossellini in Green Porno!

Then we screened for an OR activated by fertile females, and found that Or113a is potently activated by their pheromone. Knockout males for this gene have reduced attraction to females and deficits in mating, though there is ~1 additional receptor that we haven’t yet found.

(The trpc2b mutants appear behaviorally normal as far as we can tell, which is a bit of a surprise given the VNO’s important role as a pheromone sensor in rodents after work from @stowers_lisa.).

With these tools, we asked which cell population senses fertile females, and it was clear that the OR-expressing neurons are essential for males to detect the fertility pheromone. These cnga2b knockout males courted and mated with females much less, leading to low fertility.

She identified trpc2b and cnga2b, which appear expressed in all microvillous (vomeronasal-like) and ciliated (canonical olfactory, OR-type) sensory neurons, respectively. So we CRISPR’d these genes and found that these two populations could be separately inactivated.

So Jessica Bowers used single-cell RNA-seq to ID signal transduction machinery likely to be essential for specific cell types. This is important because genome duplication and evolutionary divergence complicates cross-species comparisons.