Published in eLife
The hippocampus is critical for memory formation. The hypothalamic supramammillary nucleus (SuM) sends long-range projections to hippocampal area CA2. While the SuM-CA2 connection is critical for social memory, how this input acts on the local circuit is unknown. Using transgenic mice, we found that SuM axon stimulation elicited mixed excitatory an...
Published in eLife
What level of Ras genes activity leads to the development of cancer? © 2021, Butt and Prior.
Published in eLife
RAS genes are commonly mutated in human cancer. Despite many possible mutations, individual cancer types often have a 'tropism' towards a specific subset of RAS mutations. As driver mutations, these patterns ostensibly originate from normal cells. High oncogenic RAS activity causes oncogenic stress and different oncogenic mutations can impart diffe...
Published in eLife
The pheromone system of heliothine moths is an optimal model for studying principles underlying higher-order olfactory processing. In Helicoverpa armigera, three male-specific glomeruli receive input about three female-produced signals, the primary pheromone component, serving as an attractant, and two minor constituents, serving a dual function, t...
Published in eLife
Dopamine (DA) is a critical modulator of brain circuits that control voluntary movements, but our understanding of its influence on the activity of target neurons in vivo remains limited. Here, we use two-photon Ca2+ imaging to monitor the activity of direct and indirect-pathway spiny projection neurons (SPNs) simultaneously in the striatum of beha...
Published in eLife
The model organism Caenorhabditis elegans mounts transcriptional defense responses against intestinal bacterial infections that elicit overlapping starvation and infection responses, the regulation of which is not well understood. Direct comparison of C. elegans that were starved or infected with Staphylococcus aureus revealed a large infection-spe...
Published in eLife
Myocardial infarction (MI) promotes a range of systemic effects, many of which are unknown. Here, we investigated the alterations associated with MI progression in heart and other metabolically active tissues (liver, skeletal muscle, and adipose) in a mouse model of MI (induced by ligating the left ascending coronary artery) and sham-operated mice....
Published in eLife
Heart attacks are caused by a blockage in arteries that supply oxygen to the heart. This often happens when fatty deposits (or ‘plaques’) that line blood vessels break off and create a clot. To identify individuals most at risk of this occurring, physicians currently use symptoms, family history, blood tests, imaging and surgical procedures. But be...
Published in eLife
Culture-independent analyses of microbial communities have progressed dramatically in the last decade, particularly due to advances in methods for biological profiling via shotgun metagenomics. Opportunities for improvement continue to accelerate, with greater access to multi-omics, microbial reference genomes, and strain-level diversity. To levera...
Published in eLife
Goal-directed behaviors involve distributed brain networks. The small size of the mouse brain makes it amenable to manipulations of neural activity dispersed across brain areas, but existing optogenetic methods serially test a few brain regions at a time, which slows comprehensive mapping of distributed networks. Laborious operant conditioning trai...
