Releasing the Hydra with Rafael Yuste | The Transmitter

Note: Rafael Yuste was a MBL Whitman Fellow from 2017-2019, during which time he nucleated "The Hydra Lab" at MBL, which became  "a 'watering hole' for Hydra researchers in the United States." Yuste, his graduate student Christophe Dupre (MBL Grass Fellow, 2016) and colleagues developed Hydra as a model system for studying neural circuits during their summers at MBL. A 1988 alumnus of the MBL Neurobiology course, Yuste has served on the faculty of the MBL's Methods in Computational Neuroscience, Neurobiology, and Neural Systems and Behavior courses.

Rafael Yuste woke up in his bedroom. It was early on a Sunday morning at the end of March 2019. Manhattan was quiet outside his windows. He had been dreaming of Sydney Brenner, sitting face to face with the Nobel-Prize-winning biologist. Brenner was speaking about Hydra as a model in neuroscience but also chiding Yuste, telling him to forget funding concerns and focus on the things that truly matter in science.

He was so shaken by the dream that his wife woke up, too. A few days later, Yuste was reading the news online when he saw that Brenner had died—on 5 April.

It’s not surprising that Brenner would be on Yuste’s mind, whether before, near or after Brenner’s death. Yuste considered him to be his “North Star,” and it was Brenner who initially guided Yuste toward a life in research and then, after a setback, pointed Yuste toward Hydra. “I consider him maybe the most important influence in my life as a scientist,” says Yuste, 61, professor of biological sciences at Columbia University.

Yuste’s attention and lecturing have expanded Hydra’s use in neuroscience. The BRAIN Initiative recently included Hydra as a model organism, placing it alongside canonical model systems for neuroscience, such as mice and Caenorhabditis elegans, says Jacob Robinson, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University and a collaborator of Yuste’s. This inclusion would have been “shocking 10 years ago,” he says. Read rest of the article here.

Source: Releasing the Hydra with Rafael Yuste | The Transmitter