Elissa Hallem
Neurobiologist
Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and
Molecular Genetics
University of California, Los Angeles
Age: 34
Elissa Hallem is a neuroscientist who explores the physiology and behavioral consequences of odor detection. As a graduate student, she undertook expansive studies of olfaction in fruit flies that revealed several important, and sometimes unexpected, insights. Starting with a mutant fly strain that lacks any odorant receptor in a well-characterized subset of olfactory receptor neurons, Hallem produced more than twenty different transgenic fruit fly lines, each expressing a single, known odorant receptor gene in these neurons. She then measured in each strain the electrophysiologic response to a set of more than one hundred different odorants.
Among other findings, her
analyses demonstrated that some odorant receptor types are highly selective and
others are more broadly tuned, with an unexpectedly high fraction of
odorant/receptor combinations inhibiting (rather than increasing) neuron firing
rates; as a whole, these data contribute significantly to explaining and
predicting the neural representation of odors.
As a postdoctoral fellow, she shifted her attention to the connection
between chemoreception and behavior.
Using as a model system the nematode worm C. elegans (in which the
distribution and connections of every neuron are well-characterized), she
identified the molecular mechanism for carbon dioxide sensitivity and the
neural circuits that mediate its avoidance behavior. While free-living, adult nematodes may find
carbon dioxide detection important for avoiding predators, some juvenile
parasitic nematodes use carbon dioxide to locate host organisms to invade. These parasites are endemic to human
populations, particularly in tropical regions; they infect more than 20 percent
of people across the globe. Through her
basic research, Hallem is applying her experience and expertise in invertebrate
chemoreception to identify interventions, either pharmacologic or behavioral,
that may eventually reduce the scourge of parasitic infections in humans.
Elissa Hallem received a B.A.
(1999) from Williams College and a Ph.D. (2005) from Yale University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the
California Institute of Technology (2005–2010) prior to her appointment as an assistant
professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics
at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Her scientific articles have appeared in such publications as Nature,
Cell, Annual Review of Entomology, and PNAS.
Video at:
No comments:
Post a Comment