The rockefeller university

Vanessa Ruta, the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Professor, and Thomas Tuschl, the F. M. Al Akl, M.D. and Margaret Al Akl Professor, have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Ruta is head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; Tuschl is head of the Laboratory of RNA Molecular Biology.

The mission of the NAS is to provide the nation and government with objective advice on issues in science and technology. Founded in 1863 under Abraham Lincoln, it is one of the world’s most prestigious professional societies: scientists are elected by their peers to membership for outstanding contributions to research and a consensus within the scientific community that an individual is a national leader within their field. With Ruta’s and Tuschl’s elections, 36 current Rockefeller faculty and emeriti are NAS members.

Over the past 15 years, Ruta’s laboratory has worked to delineate the neural circuits and computations that underlie innate and learned behaviors, and how these circuits can be modified through evolution or individual experience to generate novel behavioral adaptations. Working in Drosophila, she has created a unique experimental system that allows her to record neural responses to odors as flies navigate within a virtual reality environment. She has used this system to explore the functional architecture of mushroom bodies, paired, high-order brain structures essential for olfactory learning and memory, and has demonstrated how neuromodulation can act to rapidly reconfigure circuit properties and allow the same odor to drive alternative behavioral responses.

Her work has revealed how networks of dopaminergic neurons regulate the transmission of olfactory cues, either reinforcing or suppressing attraction to an odor, and has elucidated a specific neural mechanism that modulates the hard-wired response to pheromones emitted by flies from other species. In 2021, she used cryo-EM to determine the first structure of an olfactory receptor, a landmark advance that showed how a wide variety of odors can be distinguished by a limited number of odorant receptors as they are activated in combination. She has also exploited the elaborate male courtship rituals of Drosophila to understand how complex behaviors have been shaped through evolutionary selection to generate divergent mate preferences and motor displays.

Ruta, a Rockefeller alum, has been recognized with several highly prestigious honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and appointment as an HHMI investigator in 2021.

Tuschl has been a true pioneer in our understanding of how various classes of small RNA molecules act to regulate gene expression and other biological processes in eukaryotic cells, including the role they play in natural gene suppression, their therapeutic utility in silencing specific genes, and their value as biomarkers of disease. He showed that short interfering RNAs, discovered in C. elegans and shown to knock down expression of targeted genes in this species, could be used for the same purpose in mammalian cells and might be used as therapeutics in humans. He was a co-founder of the company Alnylam, which has now developed the first FDA-approved drugs using RNA interference for treatment of several human diseases. He also made important contributions to the discovery and understanding of another naturally occurring class of small RNAs, microRNAs (miRNAs), and his work has led to the identification of hundreds of distinct microRNAs that are now routinely used in scientific research. He has also made important contributions to the discovery and characterization of piwi-interfering RNAs (piRNAs) that are expressed in germline cells and are required to maintain genomic integrity.

Using single-cell RNA-seq, Tuschl worked to catalog the entire repertoire of coding and non-coding RNAs as part of a global scientific effort to understand their roles in human development and disease, and several discoveries from his lab have established links between interfering RNAs and specific diseases. He is also exploring the mechanisms by which microRNAs interact with ribonucleoprotein complexes and RNA-binding proteins and working to identify the RNA interaction networks that facilitate their activity.

Tuschl was an HHMI Investigator from 2005 to 2018 and has received numerous other awards, including a Wiley Prize in 2003.