The in-person portion of the meeting will be held at the Academy of Natural Sciences, BEES classroom (3rd floor).
Meeting agenda:
7:15 PM: Zoom opens
7:30-8 PM: Club business
8 PM: Presentation followed by questions (might start earlier if club business finishes earlier).
Please register for the meeting whether you will be attending in person or via Zoom. Then watch for the meeting link in your email. Disregard the meeting link if you will be attending in person.
Evolution and functional characterization of olfactory receptors in birds
Speaker: Robert Driver (in-person)
Vertebrates detect odor molecules with olfactory receptors (ORs), a gene family expressed in the olfactory epithelium. Among species, OR diversity is associated with reliance on smell, with some mammals exceeding 2,000 OR genes. Birds are the most speciose class of terrestrial vertebrates, inhabiting nearly all land environments and with diverse social structures and foraging strategies, yet were long thought to make limited use of olfactory signals. Recent behavioral work in birds has shown important roles for olfaction in foraging and species recognition, among other behaviors. Contributing to this surge of interest in avian olfaction, our recent work has shown that birds have hundreds more OR genes in their genomes than previously realized. We also show that bird ORs are present in the correct tissue and cell type relevant to smell, and that bird ORs respond to odors. This work provides the foundation for future studies uncovering the molecular biology and evolution of bird’s sense of smell.
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Robert received his B.S. in Biology from Muhlenberg College in 2009 and M.S. degree in Biology in 2017 from Villanova University. In 2022, he received his PhD in Biology from East Carolina University. Robert is an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Duke University School of Medicine, in the lab of Dr. Hiroaki Matsunami, where he researches bird olfactory receptors and bird sense of smell.