Nice! 🔥

Such a cool story! I loved your talk at Janelia last week!

Happy to chat about this. Could you please send me an email to start the conversation?

Absolutely! Sometimes things fall into place just right. 🐜 🧠 🐜

Yes, it really helps. We might write up a separate, detailed protocol on how we do the tissue prep and staining, but feel free to reach out in the meantime if you’re interested.

The project was spearheaded by Dominic Frank and Lindsey Lopes, with help from Rishika Mohanta, Isabelle Seckler, and Ivan Lacroix. Massive congratulations to the team! While this took a loooot of effort, the reference brain will facilitate lots of experiments and neuroscience studies down the road!

While constructing this reference, we discovered that clonal raider ant brains are highly variable. For example, while half the individuals have a left-tilted mushroom body medial lobe, the others have it tilted to the right. What that means for brain function and behavior we don’t know (yet).

These kinds of RNA-FISH stains allowed us to measure the subcellular localization of different kinds of RNAs, revealing what a given neuron transcribes, and which transcripts get actually exported into the cytoplasm, where they can be translated into protein and, therefore, functional receptors.

Here is a confocal stack of a clonal raider ant antenna from first author and FISHerman extraordinaire Giacomo Glotzer. You can see the densely packed cell bodies of olfactory sensory neurons, along with fluorescent signal from two different odorant receptors and an intergenic region.

This is the project of two fantastic graduate students in the lab, Giacomo Glotzer and Daniel Pastor. Unfortunately, both of them are too wise to be on social media.