Dr. C. Ron Yu

Biography

For a creature that can’t go on Facebook or rely on clothing cues, the mouse is remarkably adept at navigating its social environment. With just a sniff of another mouse’s urine, the little rodent can tell if the other mouse is male or female, friend or foe. The chemical signals in the urine, or pheromones, even tell a mouse to delay or accelerate puberty, abort a pregnancy, start mating or opt for a fight instead. This pheromone system “is doing an amazing amount of things,” says Ron Yu, Investigator at the Stowers Institute. So how does this process work? How can a chemical wafting through the air send a signal to the brain that triggers the appropriate behavior? That’s the fundamental question Yu has taken on—and he has made considerable progress. With a series of innovative experiments, Yu and his lab have figured out how to visualize pheromone-triggered activities in large numbers of nerve cells. And in a groundbreaking paper in Science, his team used genetically engineered mice to show that whole different sets of neurons respond depending on whether an intruder is male or female. “It’s a very interesting problem—and we’ve been fortunate enough to find some of the answers,” says Yu.

Research Interest

Our senses are remarkable in detecting stimuli from the external world, extracting features from the signals and translating the information into meaningful perception in the brain. Sensory perceptions lead to logic, measured behavioral responses at times, but other times we experience impulsive urges. The complex network of neurons in our brain underlies our senses and behaviors, but we know little about how the brain works. The goal of the research in my laboratory is to identify the neural circuitry that detects, parses, and integrates specific sensory information and to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that specify the circuitry. We employ a combination of methodologies that include molecular genetics, optical imaging, electrophysiology, behavioral assays, and systems biology to tackle a range of problems. Our current focuses are in the mammalian main olfactory and vomeronasal systems.