Meet Kristyn Lizbinski, PhD, a postdoc in the Jeanne lab whose paper was published in Current Biology. What started as a quarantine project grew into a fascinating dive into the influence of neurons’ fine-scale morphology on physiological function. Let’s take a look at her research journey!
Ten-year-old Kristyn Lizbinski treasured her “Deluxe Microscope Set,” which boasted magnifying powers of 100X to 900X. It had been a gift from Santa to reward her early curiosity about the world — young Lizbinski would be shocked by the microscope that Dr. Lizbinski now uses.
Ten-year-old Lizbinski would be even more shocked to hear about the pandemic, and how her postdoc self would react to this unprecedented situation. In the absence of in-person research, Lizbinski collaborated with Tony Liu, Dr. Pasha Davoudian, and Dr. James Jeanne to launch a project that would later evolve into a publication.
“At first it was a great way to stay connected and dive into some interesting data while we couldn’t perform in-person research,” Lizbinski said. “Over time, and a lot of effort, it grew into a fascinating comparison into how fine-scale morphology of neurons influences physiological function.”
The team compared the anatomy and physiology of synaptic connections in the Drosophila brain. Their findings began to fill the gap between connectivity maps and activity maps, which will enable new hypotheses about how network structure constrains network function.
The team ultimately found that the more synapses between neurons, the stronger their physiological connection. They further concluded that synapse location along the neuron also matters. Lizbinski felt fortunate to have access to Yale’s resources while learning new techniques to interrogate neural circuit function.
My highlight would have to be patching my first Drosophila neuron in vivo when I first started in the Jeanne lab. There’s nothing quite like the rush of seeing beautiful spikes.
Kristyn Lizbinski, PhD
Lizbinski began her research journey as an undergraduate studying ant neurobiology and behavior. At this stage, she did not realize that research could be a career, having never encountered anyone in academia growing up. The opportunity to continue research in graduate school thrilled her, opening up a whole world of possibilities. Her fascination with the flexibility of the brain inspired her to study neuromodulation in the moth olfactory system in the Dacks Lab at West Virginia University.
Her experience watching single neurons change their spike patterns in real time prompted questions that ultimately led her to the Jeanne Lab at Yale. She has found the Jeanne Lab and the overall neuroscience department at Yale to be a fantastic, supportive community that expanded how she thinks about the brain.
“I realized that brains were not static bundles of neurons, but rather dynamic integrators of experiences,” Lizbinski said. “I had found my intellectual home in the brain of an insect.”
According to Lizbinski, studying Drosophila affords the tools and tractability to further understand these complex dynamics at a systems level. In fact, she now uses the “circuit-cracking workhorse Drosophila” to understand the computations of neural circuit function.
“I believe we are at our infancy of understanding how truly flexible the brain can be,” Lizbinski said. “Work from motor systems like the stomatogastric ganglion of the crab has shown us that neurons exist in a constant soup of neuromodulators, each changing individual neurons on different timescales to alter circuit function.”
Lizbinski hopes to one day head her own lab, where she will pursue questions about the computations that support flexible network function. She also loves teaching and hopes to help young scientists cultivate their own passions.