Archived Lab News
January 2023
Dr. Christine Lattin, Dr. Tosha Kelly, and PhD students Melanie Kimball and Keegan Stansberry presented talks, and undergraduate student Raedan Stephens presented a poster on research from the lab at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology iin Austin Texas. Dr. Kelly was also awarded the 2023 Dorothy M. Skinner award, which recognizes women PhD students and postdocs who have “demonstrated outstanding scholarship and show high potential for continued excellence in research.” Congrats!
Lattin Lab members Raedan Stephens, Christine Lattin, Tosha Kelly, Keegan Stansberry, and Melanie Kimball at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Conference, January 2023.
July 2022
Dr. Lattin and Dr. Kelly attended and presented research at the International Symposium on Avian Endocrinology in Edinburgh Scotland. This meeting was an amazing opportunity to connect with scientists from around the globe who study hormones in birds!
June 2022
Dr. Lattin was interviewed by the Lab Rat Chat podcast, out as Episode 27, “The Bird is More Than the Word.”
June 2022
A paper from the lab in Behavioural Brain Research demonstrates that exposure to novel objects changes neuronal activity in several key brain regions involved in behavior in house sparrows. Most intriguingly, the back part of the hippocampus responded to novel objects while the front part did not, suggesting there may be a “caudal-rostral” axis in the avian hippocampus similar to what is seen in mammals. This project was headed by doctoral student Melanie Kimball, with help from other senior lab members and undergraduates Eve Gautreaux and Kaitlin Couvillion.
May 2022
Our paper in PLOS ONE shows that gene expression patterns (i.e., what genes are turned on or off) look very different in the brains of neophobic and non-neophobic sparrows. This work, which was done in collaboration with LSU Professor Morgan Kelly, suggests that part of what determines behavior differences may be basic differences in the amounts of different proteins, receptors, and enzymes in certain brain regions. An earlier draft of this work is also available as a preprint in BioRxiv, and this research was featured in a press release on the College of Science website.
May 2022
Undergraduate lab members Allison Cannon, Kaitlin Couvillion, and Courtney Harding all successfully defended their Senior Honors Theses from the lab, and presented their research at LSU Discover Day. Congratulations to all three!
Courtney Harding receives her Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher award.
Dr. Lattin poses with Kaitlin Couvillion and Allison Cannon at LSU Honors Graduation.
April 2022
Dr. Lattin and the lab’s research are highlighted in a nice feature story on the LSU College of Science website.
April 2022
Another collaborative microbiome project that sprang from Dr. Lattin’s PhD research has been published in the Journal of Experimental Biology! This work demonstrates that both captivity and a chronic mild stress protocol cause major changes in the types and amount of bacteria found in the house sparrow gut.
March 2022
Work out from our lab in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology finds that captivity, but not neophobia phenotype, affects the gut microbiome of house sparrows. This research was the Senior Honors Thesis of Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher Abigail Vinson, and was done in collaboration with LSU Professor Gary King.
Dr. Christine Lattin and Dr. Tosha Kelly gave oral presentations and PhD students Melanie Kimball, Keegan Stansberry and undergraduate students Allison Cannon, Kaitlin Couvillion, and Kenedi Lynch gave poster presentations of preliminary data at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in January 2022.
A new study from the lab published in the journal Hormones and Behavior shows that reducing corticosterone also reduced fearful behavior towards novel objects (neophobia) in wild house sparrows. This suggests that part of what determines an animal’s response to novelty is its background hormonal state. One post-doc, two graduate students, and three undergraduate researchers contributed to this collaborative project!
January 2022
A paper from Dr. Lattin’s postdoc is published in IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences. In the paper, Dr. Lattin and her coauthors used imaging data from rats, mice, and sparrows to determine how get the best quality data from small animal positron emission tomography (PET) imaging studies.
June 2021
January 2021
Dr. Christine Lattin, Dr. Tosha Kelly, and PhD student Melanie Kimball all gave oral presentations and PhD student Keegan Stansberry and undergraduate student Kaitlin Couvillion both gave poster presentations of preliminary data at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in January 2021.
August 2020
Our paper “No you go first: phenotype and social context affect house sparrow neophobia” is out in Biology Letters. We find that house sparrows can learn from other individuals to be more daring towards novel objects, demonstrating social learning in this species and suggesting that animal personality traits may be somewhat flexible. Read the press release from LSU about our findings here, and see coverage from the November issue of Natural History magazine about our work here.
May 2020
Congratulations to postdoctoral researcher Dr. Tosha Kelly, a 2020 recipient of the Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellowship for her work examining interactions between avian malaria and the physiological stress response in songbirds. Read the press release about Dr. Kelly’s award and her work here.
January 2020
Our review paper “Glucocorticoid negative feedback as a potential mediator of trade-offs between reproduction and survival” is published in General and Comparative Endocrinology. In this paper, we also showed that how researchers measure an animal’s ability to shut down the glucocorticoid response to stressors varies widely from study to study, and that this can affect results.