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#olfaction

2 posts2 participants0 posts today
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Dr Keith Wilson 💭

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

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Albert Cardona

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!

#ants#PhDJobs#postdocJob
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Bodo Mrozek

Shades of Yellow, Black, and Grey around 1900: "The ‘London fog’ [...] soon became as notorious an attribute [...] as ice in Moscow and wind in Chicago. In the popular imagination, it became a home and breeding ground for obscure figures and nameless, clandestine crimes." First part of of my blog post series for the German Historical Institute London "From #London Fog to Frankfurt Smog", researched in foggy November.
ghil.hypotheses.org/3903
#history #olfaction #smell #urban #climateChange

‘Image A Scene near Temple-Bar, during the Fog’, in: The Illustrated London News, 23 Nov. 1844. From The London Archives. Photo by Bodo Mrozek.
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Albert Cardona

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
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Albert Cardona

"Laterality and interhemispheric integration in the larval Drosophila olfactory system", by Zimmerman, @debivort and Samuel 2025 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

bioRxiv · Laterality and interhemispheric integration in the larval Drosophila olfactory systemAll animals with bilateral symmetry must integrate the sensory input from the left and right sides of their bodies to make coherent perceptual decisions. In Drosophila larvae, connectomic evidence suggests that olfactory signals from the two sides of the head are initially processed independently (as in the mammalian olfactory system) before being combined in the central brain. By pairing volumetric calcium imaging in intact larvae with microfluidic odor delivery and targeted laser ablation at the sensory periphery, we have mapped the propagation of olfactory signals between the two brain hemispheres, across successive layers of the larval olfactory system. This approach implicates the mushroom body (MB) as a key substrate for interhemispheric integration of odor representations. Whereas the two larval MBs appear to process odors largely independently at the level of their intrinsic neurons (Kenyon cells), the modulatory neurons of the MB show strongly symmetrized responses to asymmetric olfactory stimuli. Nevertheless, odor responses in some MB output neurons (MBONs), up to 5 synapses downstream from the sensory periphery, preserve information about stimulus laterality. Moreover, we show that asymmetric activation of these MBONs can modulate the animal's turning behavior in a side-biased manner. These findings suggest that the deeply lateralized architecture of the larval olfactory system balances the need for interhemispheric integration with the advantages of parallel sensory processing. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.
#neuroscience#Drosophila#DrosophilaLarva
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Albert Cardona

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

#neuroscience#olfaction#Drosophila
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