Dayu Lin facts for kids

Dayu Lin is a brain scientist and a professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. She is famous for finding the brain pathways, called neural circuits, in the hypothalamus that control aggressive behavior in mice. Her lab at NYU now studies the brain circuits behind natural social behaviors, especially how animals act aggressively or defensively.

Early Life and Education

Dayu Lin was born in Shanghai, China. She started her university studies in biology at Fudan University in 1997. For her first research project, she studied a brain disease called Alzheimer's.

After getting her science degree in 2001, Lin went on to study brain science (neurobiology) at Duke University in North Carolina. She worked with a scientist named Lawrence Katz. She explored how the brain processes smells, which is very important for animals to understand their social world.

Lin studied how the olfactory bulb, a part of the brain that handles smell, reacts to different social smells. She recorded brain activity and found that specific brain cells reacted to single smells. For example, she found a chemical in male mouse urine that made it more attractive to female mice. Her work showed that the brain understands a complex smell by adding up how it reacts to each individual part of that smell.

After finishing her studies in 2005, Lin moved to California. She did more research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). There, she worked with David Anderson, studying the brain circuits that control natural social behaviors, especially aggression, in mice. In Anderson's lab, Lin discovered that a part of the brain called the ventromedial hypothalamus plays a key role in causing aggressive behavior. She found that if she turned on these brain cells using a special light technique, male mice would attack other mice or even objects. She also found that turning off these cells stopped aggression. Her research at Caltech finished in 2010.

Career and Research

In 2010, Dayu Lin became a professor at the New York University Langone Medical Center. She is a Professor of Psychiatry and a Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology. Lin's lab studies the brain circuits that control natural social behaviors in mice. They focus especially on aggression and defensive behaviors.

Lin's important discovery about the ventrolateral part of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) and its role in aggression is the basis for much of her lab's work. They use special genetic tools and record brain activity to understand other brain areas connected to the VMHvl. They also look at how aggression works differently in male and female brains. They study the specific chemicals (like neuropeptides and neurotransmitters) that help these brain circuits communicate.

Brain Circuits for Aggression

After finding out that the VMHvl is important for aggression, Lin and her team wanted to understand how the brain calculates aggressive behavior. They found groups of brain cells that became active when a male mouse investigated another male, attacked, or when it was a certain distance from an aggressor. Lin's team discovered that the VMHvl can process information from the environment that helps start and continue aggression in mice. This includes movement, sensory information, and motivation.

Lin and her team then looked at how mice choose to attack. They found that the VMHvl is vital for a mouse to seek out aggression. If they turned off this area, mice were less likely to seek aggression. If they turned it on, mice sought aggression more and attacked harder later. By recording brain activity, they saw that VMHvl neurons track learned aggression-seeking behavior.

Lin's team also found a specific pathway from the VMHvl to another brain area called the lateral periaqueductal grey (lPAG). This pathway helps turn the signals from the VMHvl into actual aggressive actions. Since the brain signals in these pathways matched jaw muscle movements, Lin's team suggested that the lPAG activity is a simpler code from the VMHvl that drives actions related to aggression.

Defence Behavior

Lin had noticed in her earlier research that activating the VMH sometimes led to defensive behavior in mice. So, she wanted to find out which VMH neurons control defensive actions. She found that certain cells, called estrogen receptor α expressing cells, became excited during defense. When these cells were turned off, animals being attacked could not defend themselves well. Further studies showed that cells in the front part of the VMHvl were specifically active during defense, but not during aggression. This suggests these cells are important for an animal to defend itself against others of its kind.

Awards and Honors

• 2016 Irma T. Hirschi Career Scientist Award - New York University
• 2013 McKnight Scholar Award
• 2012 Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award
• 2012 Alfred P. Sloan Fellow
• 2011 Klingenstein Neuroscience Fellow
• 2006 Capranica Prize in Neuroethology

Select Publications

• Hierarchical Representations Of Aggression In A Hypothalamic-Midbrain Circuit. Falkner, Annegret L; Wei, Dongyu; Song, Anjeli; Watsek, Li W; Chen, Irene; Chen, Patricia; Feng, James E; Lin, Dayu. Neuron. 2020 Mar 06;
• Hypothalamic Control Of Conspecific Self-Defense. Wang, Li; Talwar, Vaishali; Osakada, Takuya; Kuang, Amy; Guo, Zhichao; Yamaguchi, Takashi; Lin, Dayu. Cell Reports. 2019 Feb 12; 26(7):1747-1758.e5
• Sun F, Zeng J, Jing M, Zhou J, Feng J, Owen SF, Luo Y, Li F, Wang H, Yamaguchi T, Yong Z, Gao Y, Peng W, Wang L, Zhang S, ... ... Lin D, et al. 2019. A Genetically Encoded Fluorescent Sensor Enables Rapid and Specific Detection of Dopamine in Flies, Fish, and Mice. Cell. 174: 481–496.e19. PMID 30007419 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.06.042
• Hashikawa K, Hashikawa Y, Tremblay R, Zhang J, Feng JE, Sabol A, Piper WT, Lee H, Rudy B, Lin D. Esr1(+) cells in the ventromedial hypothalamus control female aggression. 2018. Nature Neuroscience. PMID 28920934 DOI: 10.1038/nn.4644
• Falkner AL, Grosenick L, Davidson TJ, Deisseroth K, Lin D. Hypothalamic control of male aggression-seeking behavior. 2016. Nature Neuroscience. PMID 26950005 DOI: 10.1038/nn.4264
• Wang L, Chen IZ, Lin D. Collateral pathways from the ventromedial hypothalamus mediate defensive behaviors. 2015. Neuron. 85: 1344–58. PMID 25754823 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.12.025
• Falkner AL, Dollar P, Perona P, Anderson DJ, Lin D. Decoding ventromedial hypothalamic neural activity during male mouse aggression. 2014. The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society For Neuroscience. 34: 5971–84. PMID 24760856 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5109-13.2014
• Lin D, Boyle MP, Dollar P, Lee H, Lein ES, Perona P, Anderson DJ. Functional identification of an aggression locus in the mouse hypothalamus. 2011. Nature. 470: 221–6. PMID 21307935 DOI: 10.1038/nature09736
• Lin da Y, Shea SD, Katz LC. Representation of natural stimuli in the rodent main olfactory bulb. 2006. Neuron. 50: 937–49. PMID 16772174 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2006.03.021
• Lin DY, Zhang SZ, Block E, Katz LC. Encoding social signals in the mouse main olfactory bulb. 2005. Nature. 434: 470–7. PMID 15724148 DOI: 10.1038/nature03414