Tour-de-force paper from Josefina del Marmol and Vanessa Ruta Rockefeller University The first structure of any odorant receptor binding a ligand. In this figure, the ligand is the bug spray DEET rdcu.be/csbex

A belated update: After a great time at D-USYS@ETH, I’m thrilled to join the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology with my group. Thanks Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology for the warm welcome! We'll be hiring soon—if you're interested in social behavior, disease spread, or ants, please get in touch!

(1/12) Posted my 1st preprint! Curious to know what might happen in your brain as you browse a restaurant menu? We find a rise-to-threshold neural signal that dictates a "similar" decision in flies! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

🎉🎉🎉 Fantastic news, and I’m v excited for a future of even more #CRAP! 🐜🐜

(1/13) Posted my 2nd preprint! Can flies build/update a "model" of their environment and use it to guide decisions? We tracked flies as they decided whether to lay eggs and inferred what they "know" about their local environment. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Incredible lab, research programme, and university. And now the ability to do serious neuroscience with a serious social insect. Apply!

Early stocking stuffer idea: "glowworms" (non-arthropod) for every biologist in your life. Our paper on transgenesis in Hofstenia is now online Developmental Cell: authors.elsevier.com/a/1e2T-5Sx5gmJ…

Do you work with hemimetabolous #insects? Shed tears of envy over transgenic flies and genetically modified #CRISPR mosquitoes? Let's change the game! Help us choose species of Hemimetabola for functional #genetics tool improvement & development! tinyurl.com/4vkkj4h2

The del Mármol lab has officially launched! And I have finally come around to making a website delmarmol.hms.harvard.edu We are hiring postdocs! If you are interested in molecular mechanisms of olfaction, please apply, and help me spread the word!

Paper out!!! #Drosophila has muscles that attach to their retinas, which it uses to move its photoreceptor sheet in ways that resemble vertebrate eye movements nature nature.com/articles/s4158…

Paper is out! #Drosophila 'know' what's best! Flies build an internal expectation of the substrate options in their environment and use it to make informed egg-laying decisions. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… [fly exploring options before laying an egg on the best one, 20x speed]🧵(1/7)

(1/5) My first paper on ants with Daniel Kronauer is out! We discovered that ant pupae secrete the molting fluid, and adults and larvae drink it. Young larvae need the fluid for growth and survival, and pupae die if the fluid is not removed. Open access: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Shazam! Here is the reveal: ant pupae secrete their molting fluid, and larvae and adults consume it. This creates interdependencies across different ant developmental stages. Thanks also to all our collaborators at the various resource centers Rockefeller University!

Ever wonder where adult pluripotent stem cells such as neoblasts come from? Check out the work of Julian Kimura, Marce Bolaños, and Lorenzo Ricci out today. We identified embryonic origins of neoblasts in Hofstenia embryos. authors.elsevier.com/a/1gDLWL7PXiqi1

A big chunk of my PhD work is finally out Cell !! I want to thank Dr. Marcela Bolaños, Dr. Lorenzo Ricci, Mansi, and the Srivastava Lab Srivastava Lab, as this project was not possible without their help. cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

Hey friends, today our 7-year queen-like mutant project is out in Current Biology. These mutant raider ants show the core traits of parasitic ant species, but arose in a laboratory stock just a handful of generations before we discovered them -- probably due to a mutant supergene

A natural caste mutant in the clonal raider ant sheds light on a controversial topic: the evolution of socially parasitic ants. Paper led by Buck Trible just dropped. With Vikram Chandra, Kip Lacy, @Gina_Lim0n, @Dorylophile, Leonora, and Sam Arsenault. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S09…

The ant colonies are plagued by impostors: parasitic ants that resemble queens. They greedily eat the colony’s food, but shirk their own foraging duties, and can only hatch more parasites instead of workers when they reproduce. nyti.ms/3ESs9Dg