Congratulations to the the following Neuroscience Department Faculty members for being selected as 2017 Discovery Award winners! 

      Christopher Potter

      Marshall Schuler

      Ernst Niebur

      Patricia Janak

      Jeremiah Cohen

Neuroscientist King-Wai Yau of Johns Hopkins University has made fundamental discoveries concerning the mechanisms underlying sensory transduction. His research over the past four decades has focused primarily on vision. “Vision is one of our most precious senses from which come art, science, humanity, beauty, and practically all aspects of life,” says Yau. His findings concerning phototransduction—the process by which light is converted into a neural signal—have led to a sophisticated understanding of many hereditary diseases causing blindness. Additionally, Yau has elucidated the process of olfaction transduction that, like vision, relies on a G protein-coupled cellular signaling pathway. His Inaugural Article, signifying his 2010 election to the National Academy of Sciences, advances understanding of the electrical response of olfactory neurons to odorants.

Publications from Primary Faculty Members - June 2017:

Harraz MM, Snyder SH. Antidepressant Actions of Ketamine Mediated by the Mechanistic Target of Rapamycin, Nitric Oxide, and Rheb. Neurotherapeutics. 2017 Jun 13. doi: 10.1007/s13311-017-0540-0. [Epub ahead of print]

Jeck DM, Qin M, Egeth H, Niebur E. Attentive pointing in natural scenes correlates with other measures of attention. Vision Res. 2017 Jun;135:54-64. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2017.04.001. Epub 2017 May 8.

Vasavda C, Zaccor NW, Scherer PC, Sumner CJ, Snyder SH. Measuring G-protein-coupled Receptor Signaling via Radio-labeled GTP Binding. J Vis Exp. 2017 Jun 9;(124). doi: 10.3791/55561.

Wang Q, Yue WWS, Jiang Z, Xue T, Kang SH, Bergles DE, Mikoshiba K, Offermanns S, Yau KW. Synergistic Signaling by Light and Acetylcholine in Mouse Iris Sphincter Muscle. Curr Biol. 2017 Jun 19;27(12):1791-1800.e5. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.022. Epub 2017 Jun 1.

Xie X, Tabuchi M, Brown MP, Mitchell SP, Wu MN, Kolodkin AL. The laminar organization of the Drosophila ellipsoid body is semaphorin-dependent and prevents the formation of ectopic synaptic connections. Elife. 2017 Jun 20;6. pii: e25328. doi: 10.7554/eLife.25328. [Epub ahead of print]

In a report in the June 19 issue of the journal Current Biology, Neuroscience Professor King-Wai Yau and colleagues detail how the pupils in a mouse’s eyes get smaller when the animal is moved from a dark to a lit room even when the nerve connections between the animal’s brain and eyes are severed.