CANCELED: 2020 Picower Lecture with Catherine Dulac, HHMI, Harvard University

Catherine Dulac is interested in the neural mechanisms underlying instinctive behaviors in mice. In earlier work she developed single cell cDNA cloning strategies to characterize novel families of pheromone receptors in the vomeronasal organ (VNO), thus providing new avenues of research into the logic of the pheromone-evoked responses in mammals. Her group identified key signaling molecules associated with pheromone detection, developed molecular strategies to uncover signals detected by individual VNO receptors, and investigated the functional organization of discrete pheromone-evoked behaviors circuits. Using new viral, genetic, and electrophysiological strategies to gain information about the brain processing of pheromone signals, her laboratory revealed the key role of VNO inputs in insuring the sex-specificity of pheromone evoked-behaviors, and demonstrated that functional neuronal circuits underlying male and female-specific behaviors co-exist in the brain of both sexes. Recently, her group uncovered a set of hypothalamic neurons expressing the peptide galanin that governs male and female paternal behavior in mice. In addition, her laboratory performed a genome-wide characterization of genomic imprinting in the adult and developing mouse brain, and uncovered large number of novel genes with parent-of-origin allelic expression differences, underscoring genomic imprinting as a major mode of epigenetic regulation in the brain.