ABOUT US

Commitment to innovation, excellence, equity, and inclusivity

The Dymecki Lab embraces the core mission of Harvard Medical School, which is to alleviate human suffering by nurturing a diverse group of leaders and future leaders in biomedical inquiry.  Dymecki is dedicated to ensuring excellence in scientific training, innovativeness in experimental approach, and accessibility to tools, reagents, and results. Inclusivity and equity define the lab culture.

Specialization in the Serotonin System Shapes Behavior

and Regulates Homeostasis

The Dymecki lab studies how functional modularity arises within the brain serotonergic neuronal system and dynamically controls diverse processes ranging from respiration and thermal balance to emotional mood state to coping behaviors…

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RESEARCH

A SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT in honor of Jia Jia Mai who advanced the science and careers of many in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School.

2021 will be a different year for the Dymecki Lab, as Jia Jia Mai, their sole lab manager for over 20 years, has retired.  Standing behind every success of the lab has been Jia Jia, tirelessly working to ensure that we have the best of equipment, reagents, stocks, and mouse colony. She has inspired us all with her high standards, efficient approaches, and devotion to excellence professionally and personally. In this way, all of our work has been enriched. It is with much admiration and gratitude that we wish Jia Jia the very best as she embarks on new adventures.

LAB NEWS

  • Graduate student Rebecca Senft did some work away from the lab bench, collaborating on "Best practices and tools for reporting reproducible fluorescence microscopy methods." A comprehensive guide for how to get consistent results in microscopy, this paper walks through a number of elements including how to best approach meta-data reporting, different types of microscopes, validation, and more. This paper is now available at Nature Methods.
  • Read our latest publication “Neurochemically and Hodologically Distinct Ascending VGLUT3 versus Serotonin Subsystems Comprise the r2-Pet1 Median Raphe,” now available in the Journal of Neuroscience. We describe “sister” Pet1 lineages, one serotonergic and the other largely glutamatergic, with the latter forming exquisite presynaptic structures called pericellular baskets in the septum, hippocampus, and cortex.
  • The Dymecki Lab's work was recently featured in the New York Times article "What Causes SIDS?" by Carrie Arnold, which can be read here.
HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS