Genes, Behavior, and the Sense of Smell
Cori Bargmann
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University


Lecture Abstract:
The sense of smell is a primitive sense that is shared by all animals, and it often has special access to innate behaviors. Specific odors can lead to strong behavioral responses, emotional responses, and memories. Studying the sense of smell can give insights into the relationship between sensory experience and the complex responses of an individual.

Odors are recognized by a special class of protein in the nose, the olfactory receptor proteins. There are hundreds of different olfactory receptor proteins expressed in the nose of an animal. We can use these to probe the mechanisms of olfactory recognition, discrimination, and learning. We use simple animals to study these questions, but we believe that the general rules will be relevant to humans as well.

Many animals exhibit strong innate responses to odors from food, predators, and other individuals of their own species. Since the animal does not have to learn to like or dislike these odors, the odors seem to feed into an innate behavioral template. Our results suggest a hard-wired innate map that matches odors to behavior. At the same time learning influence the olfactory system in profound ways, allowing the animal’s future response to odors to be shaped by its previous experience.

One intriguing odor-induced behavior is the response to pheromones, chemical cues that are produced by other members of a species. Different individuals may respond to pheromones in different ways, depending on their sex, reproductive status, and experience. We are studying natural differences between the ways that individuals respond to pheromones. In our experimental animal, C. elegans, some individuals are solitary, and prefer to feed alone, while other individuals gather into large feeding groups of dozens or hundreds of animals. A single gene can determine whether the animal prefers a solitary or a social feeding pattern. This gene is embedded in the olfactory pathways and provides a molecular link that connects pheromone sensation, feeding, and a specific behavioral response.

Cori Bargmann, Ph.D. is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor, and Head of Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at The Rockefeller University. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. After completing her postdoctoral research with H. Robert Horvitz at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at MIT, Dr. Bargmann joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco in 1991. She was appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 1995 and was promoted to a full Professor at UCSF in 1998. Dr. Bargmann joined the faculty of the Rockefeller University in 2004. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Dr. Bargmann s a member of a number of committees, advisory boards, and panels, and is currently on the editorial boards of the journals Cell, Neuron, Genes and Development, Current Biology, and Science.

Dr. Vince Dionne will introduce Dr. Bargmann. Dr. Dionne is a Professor of Biology at Boston University (BU) and Director ad interim of the Boston University Marine Program. He joined the BU Marine Program in 1993, moving to Woods Hole from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine where he had been a faculty member for 15 years. After receiving his B.S. degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Arizona, he did postdoctoral training with Charles F. Stevens at the University of Washington, Seattle.

About the Lang Lecture
The annual Lang Lecture is held in memory of Dr. Fred Lang, a neurobiologist with the Boston University Marine Program at the MBL who was killed tragically in an automobile accident in December 1978.