behavioralplasticity.orgA paper titled “Invariant odor recognition with ON–OFF neural ensembles” has been published by Dr. Barani Raman and his team at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). The work has been highlighted in the WUSTL newsroom: “The ‘surprisingly simple’ arithmetic of smell”.
The BPRI’s first research engagement series release on the Global Locust Network (GLN) community has reached nearly 100 views. The first series highlights Dr. Britt Peterson‘s microbes research.
Dr. Peterson explained:
“Microbes are often the invisible drivers of many characteristics that we assume to be determined by the host itself or by the environment. In insects, gut bacteria are known to manipulate a seemingly endless list of traits including behavior, growth, food preferences, and mate selection. These are all traits that may have impacts on locust swarming and migration. I think that understanding the composition of bacterial communities in the locust guts and seeing if they change during phase change can be important for both pesticide and biocontrol efforts to combat swarms.”
Congratulations to Sai Prasada Manikonda and Sreeram Satish, two high school students working with Herman Dierick! Their poster on orthologs of pigmentation genes in Schistocerca gregaria won first place in the high school category of the 2020 Sigma Xi Student National Research Conference.
The inaugural press release of the BPRI is available here.