Highlights from our fourth year!
Our paper on connectomic analyses of taste circuits was published in Scientific Reports! This study, led by undergraduate Sydney Walker and PhD student Marco Peña Garcia, provides a comprehensive overview of circuits for early taste processing in the fly brain. We identified brain regions that process different tastes, analyzed the overlap and interconnections between different taste pathways, characterized modality-dependent differences in taste neuron properties, identified non-taste inputs to taste pathways, and used computational simulations to relate neuronal connectivity to predicted activity. The journal editor predicted that “this will be a fundamental paper in the field” - we certainly hope so!
Our paper on dopamine reward neurons was published in iScience! This study was led by former technician Fio Lozada-Perdomo and current technician Yuzhen Chen, with the help of many others in the lab. We showed that the activation of reward-encoding dopamine neurons (DANs) promotes innate aversion despite serving as a positive reinforcement signal for appetitive learning. These opposing roles likely arise from distinct effects – direct activation versus synaptic plasticity – on the same target neurons. We speculate that this opposing relationship may represent a mechanism to compare current reward with expected reward based on learning.
We contributed imaging data to a study on dArc1 by Sophie Caron’s lab, which was published in Current Biology!
Dr. Devineni contributed a perspective about the fly brain connectome for the Transmitter and was interviewed for another Transmitter article about the first connectome of the entire fly nervous system.
Our trainees won awards!
Elle McCall received an F31 from NIDCD to study the integration of taste signals across organs. Her proposal received an impact score of 12, setting a new lab record for best score on an NIH grant!
Elle McCall also received an Honorable Mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program in a year where the number of awards was cut by 1000.
Our R01 diversity supplement to support Yuzhen Chen was approved for funding but, unfortunately, was then withheld due to the cancellation of “DEI” programs by the new federal government. We are still proud that NIDCD recognized Yuzhen’s potential as a future PhD student and independent scientist.
Elle McCall passed her oral qualifying exam and Yen-Ju Chen passed written quals!
We presented our work! Several lab members attended the CSHL Neurobiology of Drosophila meeting (pics below), with Yuzhen Chen presenting a very well-attended poster. Dr. Devineni also presented talks at the Crete Neural Circuits workshop and a symposium at Stanford.
We celebrated new lab members joining.
We were excited that Neuroscience PhD student Yen-Ju Chen decided to join our lab! Yen-Ju comes from Taiwan with a Master’s degree and has experience in C. elegans and mouse neural circuits.
We welcomed several new undergraduate students: Hanti Jiang, Viola Ming, Aiden Golub, and Akhila Jallepalli.
We said goodbye to lab members moving on to bigger and better things.
One of our first graduate students, Trinity Pruitt, graduated with a Master’s degree in December. She is now working as a Behavioral Health Technician for an addiction recovery center.
Four of our undergraduates, Anna Perry, Alex Koeppel, Lam Nguyen, and Sydney Walker graduated from Emory last spring! Anna is now a PhD student at UNC, Sydney is putting her data science skills to good use in industry, and Alex and Lam are applying for medical school.
We had a bunch of lab celebrations, including our end of the school year celebration, summer music bingo party, Halloween pumpkin decorating, paper celebrations, and December holiday party.
We began our last (NCE) year of funding from the Whitehall Foundation and our third year of NIH R01 funding. We are grateful to our funders for their support!
We also had plenty of setbacks, including grant rejections, failed experiments, weird data, a partial lab closure from last year’s flood, and lots of repercussions from the new federal government - including cancelled grant funding, cancelled grant reviews, threats to academic freedom, and policies threatening the safety of international trainees. We will continue standing up for science and supporting each other through these tough times.
We’re looking forward to doing more awesome science in 2026, and we’re recruiting new people! Learn about joining the lab here.
Like every year, we want to thank everyone who has helped and supported us! That includes all our amazing colleagues at Emory and Georgia Tech and beyond. Special thanks to Robert Liu, Anita Corbett, Gordon Berman, Sam Sober, Leila Rieder, Malu Murugan, Alan Emanuel, Dieter Jaeger, and Astrid Prinz. We also want to thank the Biology department chair Steve L’Hernault and the staff members who make sure things run smoothly and help us deal with crises, from power outages to building floods to missing grant checks… we are lucky to be in the best department ever!
