Churchland lab

Discoveries made by plant geneticists in the 1940s are changing our understanding of the brain. Specifically, Barbara McClintock’s (left) discovery of transposons, for which she won the nobel prize, has turned out to be important not only for understanding gene function in plants, but in brains as well. Tranposons, described by the New Yorker as “wandering snippets of DNA that hide in genomes, copying and pasting themselves at random” account for ~40% of our genome. They are likely to play a key role in normal brain function, and also might be involved in neurodegenerative diseases including ALS.

The importance of transposons for all biology inspired current CSHL graduate students and motivated them to create a lecture series named after Barbara McClintock. The first one was today, and in recognition of the role of transposons in the brain, they invited a neuroscientists, Ann Graybiel (right) from MIT, to be the first recipient. Ann’s work on the striatum has been critical for the field’s growing understanding of how incoming inputs can lead to actions, especially ones that are reinforced and become habitual. Her emerging work is especially exciting as her lab is leveraging modern techinques to specifically measure and manipulate classes of cells within the striatum to understand their role in different behaviors and decisions.

To commemorate the creation of this new lecture series and its first recipient, neuroscientists from around New York gathered to honor Ann and attend her talk. Researchers focussing on decision-making, attention, vision and auditory processing came together and some lively discussions ensued! It was a lot of fun to show the setups in the my lab to this crew, which included Jackie Gottlieb, Yael Niv, Heather Read and Ariana Maffei, and we realized many links between our collective research programs that I hope will lead to new collaborations down the line.