Principal Investigator:
Justus Verhagen, PhDFellow
The John B. Pierce Laboratory
Associate Professor of Neuroscience
Yale School of Medicine
Research Interests
The main focus of the Verhagen lab is to explore the neural basis of flavor perception. Flavor perception has great relevance to the ongoing obesity epidemic, as it directly guides our daily food choices. Our approach to understanding the fundamental principles of human flavor perception is to use innovative rodent models that enable high resolution neurophysiological studies under conditions of controlled flavor experience. However, we know virtually nothing about how rodents perceive and process flavor. The lab has started to make significant advances in these areas.
Current Projects
We have developed sophisticated methods for combining behavioral and neural methods, notably, optogenetic imaging and stimulation techniques in awake, unrestrained animals.
One of the main research areas is the neural encoding of retronasal smell. We optically image the input and output of the olfactory bulb in both rats and transgenic mice. In collaboration with Dr. Gordon Shepherd, Department of Neurobiology, Yale School of Medicine, we are exploring the perceptual significance of small-scale temporal dynamics of the olfactory bulb. Here, Channel-Rhodopsin mice discriminate sniff-triggered movies projected onto their olfactory bulbs. This complex fully automated project is pinning down the minimal temporal discriminability of virtual odors. Dr. Shepherd and I are also exploring the input-output relationship between optically stimulated glomeruli and electrophysiologically recorded mitral cells (spatio-temporal transfer functions).
Our interest in odor coding in the olfactory bulb has led to an additional collaboration with Dr. Fahmeed Hyder, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Director of MRRC and QNMR, Yale School of Medicine, with whom we are exploring the similarity in optically and micro-fMRI-imaged rats exposed to retro- and orthonasal odorants. This will allow both translation of rodent imaging to human work, and deeper understanding of whole-bulb food-related response patterns.
Laboratory Links
The Verhagen lab is researching the general mechanisms of odor navigation, funded by NSF (Brain Initiative) in a large cross-disciplinary team. At Pierce we are developing and implementing odor source localization using a virtual olfactory environment.
See more at odornavigation.org
Representative Publications
Rebello MR, McTavish TS, Willhite DC, Short SM, Shepherd GM, Verhagen JV.
Perception of Odors Linked to Precise Timing in the Olfactory System.
PLoS Biol. 2014 Dec 16;12(12):e1002021. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002021. eCollection 2014 Dec.
Gautam SH and Verhagen JV
Direct behavioral evidence for retronasal olfaction in rats
PLOS ONE 7(9):e44781; 2012
Gautam SH and Verhagen JV
Retronasal odor representations in the dorsal olfactory bulb of rats
J Neurosc 6;32(23):7949-7959; 2012
Gautam SH, Rebello MR, Verhagen JV
Taste quality and intensity of 100 stimuli as reported by rats: the taste-location association task.
Frontiers Behav Neurosci 6:19; 2012. (doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2012.00019)
Gautam SH and Verhagen JV
Evidence that the sweetness of odors depends on experience in rats.
Chem Senses 35(9): 767-776; 2010
Wesson DW*, Carey RM*, Verhagen JV* and Wachowiak M.
Rapid encoding and perception of novel odors in the rat.
PLOS Biology 6(4): e82; 2008; * equal contribution
Verhagen JV, Wesson DW, Netoff TI, White JA, Wachowiak M.
Sniffing controls an adaptive filter of sensory input to the olfactory bulb.
Nature Neuroscience 10(5): 631-639; 2007
Kadohisa M, Rolls ET and Verhagen JV.
Neuronal representations of stimuli in the mouth: the primate insular taste cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala.
Chemical Senses 30(5): 401-419; 2005
Verhagen JV and Scott TR.
Artificial neural network analysis of gustatory responses in the thalamic taste relay of the rat.
Physiol & Behav. 80(4): 499-513; 2004
Verhagen JV, Giza BK, Scott TR.
Responses to taste stimulation in the ventroposteromedial nucleus of the thalamus in rats.
J. Neurophysiol. 89(1):265-275; 2003
Verhagen JV.
The neurocognitive bases of human multimodal food perception: Consciousness.
Brain Research and Brain Research Reviews 53(2):271-286; 2006 (review)
Verhagen JV and Engelen L.
The neurocognitive bases of human multimodal food perception: Sensory integration. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 30(5): 613-650; 2006 (review)
Laboratory Members
Principal Investigator
Graduate Student
Yale University
Undergraduate Student
University of New Haven
Research Assistant
Graduate Student
University of New Haven