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#olfaction

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Fascinating: direct and indirect activity of olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) in response to CO2 via lateral interactions in the antennal lobe, presumably mediated by excitatory local neurons (eLNs) as described 20 years ago by Rachel Wilson's lab.

"Parallel encoding of CO2 in attractive and aversive glomeruli by selective lateral signaling between olfactory afferents" Zocchi et al. (Elizabeth Hong) 2022.
cell.com/current-biology/fullt

"Olfactory coding", Barnum and Hong 2023.
cell.com/current-biology/fullt

"Olfaction is at once both the primitive sensory modality and one of the hardest to understand, in large part due to the complexity of olfactory stimulus space. Whereas light and sound are easily ordered along natural physical axes that are reflected in their respective sensory codes, the organizational axes of odor space are not obvious."

Fun #smell fact: #petrichor, the distinctive odour that occurs when it rains after periods of dry weather, is caused by a chemical (geosmin) emitted by bacteria in the soil. For reasons that are unclear, humans are extraordinarily sensitive to geosmin, being able to detect concentrations as low as four parts per billion. Perhaps somewhere in our evolutionary history this ability helped our ancestors detect and seek out water, much as camels do today. #olfaction

2-year Postdoc Position: Evolution and Organization of Ant Olfactory Systems

– in Carlotta Martelli's lab at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany.

mrtlllab.uni-mainz.de/wp-conte

"The ideal candidate should have a strong background in bioinformatics, ideally with practical or theoretical experience in single-cell transcriptomics or comparative genomics. A keen interest in neurobiology is essential. Additional skills in evolutionary biology, insect handling, and programming (preferably in Python) would be advantageous, but are not mandatory."

Position still open!

PhD project with Marcus Stensmyr @MarcusStensmyr :

"will address fundamental questions about how the fly's sense of smell operates. More specifically, the prospective PhD student will map the evolution of chemoreceptors in drosophilids over deep time and investigate how these receptors are used to extract sensory information from the environment. The project will utilize museomics, comparative genomics, electrophysiology, and fieldwork to trace the functional evolution of chemoreceptor genes within Drosophilidae."

Knowing Marcus a bit, it is also going to be a lot of fun. And in a great city too – Lund, Sweden.

Apply by May 5th.

#Drosophila #olfaction #PhDPosition #PhDJobs
lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID

lu.varbi.comDoctoral student in BiologySubject description Biology is the broad subject about all living things. It encompasses everything from processes at the molecular and cellular level to global processes at ecosystem level. The subje

Temperature matters:

"brain connectivity scales continuously across temperatures"

With impacts on brain function:

"developmental temperature does not alter odor encoding in first- and second-order neurons, but it shifts the specificity of connections onto third-order neurons that mediate innate behaviors."

From: "Impact of developmental temperature on neural growth, connectivity, and function", by Züfle et al. 2025 (Carlotta Martelli's lab)
science.org/doi/full/10.1126/s