Heads of Laboratories
Chemers Family Associate Professor; Investigator, HHMI
Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior
leslie@rockefeller.edu
The goal of the Vosshall laboratory is to understand how olfactory signals in the environment that signal food, danger or potential mating partners modulate animal behavior. Working with Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, mosquitoes and human subjects, Dr. Vosshall’s research has yielded new knowledge about how odor stimuli are processed and perceived.
Dr. Vosshall’s lab is working to understand how the fly is able to discriminate between the thousands of available odorants in the environment, and how different odors can elicit distinct behavioral responses. In insects, a large family of novel odorant receptors mediates the first step in olfactory recognition. In Drosophila, this family consists of 62 members, expressed in an intricate and spatially invariant pattern across the 1,500 olfactory neurons that make up the organism’s olfactory sensory organs.
One member of the odorant gene family, Or83b, is of particular interest to the Vosshall lab, as it is unique in being expressed in nearly all olfactory neurons and is highly conserved across insect evolution. Dr. Vosshall’s lab has shown that Or83b functions as a coreceptor, working in tandem with odorant receptors in the dendrites of olfactory neurons. Furthermore, Dr. Vosshall and her colleagues revealed that as a receptor/coreceptor unit, the receptor takes the form of an ion channel. These findings played a pivotal role in understanding how different compounds, including those in insect repellents, interfere with an insect’s ability to smell.
Dr. Vosshall has also revamped traditional ideas regarding the roles of ionotropic glutamate receptors, proteins that respond to the neurotransmitter glutamate at synapses to help animals learn, move and remember. Research from Dr. Vosshall’s lab has shown that flies put them to use in their antennae to detect odor molecules in the air. The receptors, which the Vosshall lab named ionotropic receptors, completed the organizational logic of the fly olfactory system. In a series of psychophysical studies, the Vosshall lab has also been the first to reveal that genetic variations in a single odorant receptor called OR7D4 determines individual differences in humans’ perception of two odorous steroids produced in human sweat, androstenone and androstadienone. To better understand the social implications of the finding, Dr. Vosshall has initiated a series of studies to disentangle whether women’s perception of and sensitivity to androstadienone corresponds with their bodies’ physiological responses to it.
In addition to humans and fruit flies, the Vosshall lab studies the malaria mosquito (Anopheles gambiae) and the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti), which have both evolved an intense attraction to human body odor and carbon dioxide — the gas humans exhale — and thus serve as deadly vectors of infectious disease. Dr. Vosshall’s lab has identified a set of chemosensory receptors, known as Gr21a and Gr63a, that are responsible for the detection of carbon dioxide. They have also pinpointed these proteins as potential targets for chemical inhibitors, which may help fight mosquito-transmitted infectious diseases.
Mosquitoes also display an amazing and important sexual dimorphism in behavior. While male mosquitoes feed entirely on plants, gravid females alternate between feeding on humans to obtain protein to ripen their eggs and avoiding humans. This alternating sequence of physiological and behavioral events is well described, but there is a dearth of mechanistic insight into the nature of the signals and neuronal circuits that modulate these behaviors. This problem of how genes and neural circuits control bloodfeeding behavior in the mosquito is an important question to be investigated in the Vosshall laboratory.
CAREER
Dr. Vosshall received her undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Columbia University in 1987 and her Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1993. She conducted her postdoctoral training with Richard Axel at Columbia from 1993 to 2000, when she returned to Rockefeller as assistant professor. She was appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2008.
Dr. Vosshall received the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2007. In 2005 she received the New York City Mayor’s
Award for Excellence in Science and Technology and the Irma T. Hirschl/Monique Weill-Caulier Trust Research Award. In 2002
she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and was named a John Merck Fund Scholar. She
was named an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator in 2001, when she also received a National Science
Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award and a McKnight Scholar Award in Neuroscience.
|
| Return to full listing |
|
