Jessica Zung

Happy to share a new review I wrote with @lindymcbr for @CurrentBiology! If you’ve ever wondered about the source of your stank or just want to learn why humans smell weird (it's true!), then this review is for you! 👃🧪🤔 doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.…

If you do not have access and would like to read the review, please DM me for a PDF. Enjoy! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Read the review for the full story and for more cool tidbits about skin biology! E.g., did you know that… …acne is unique to humans? …when you smell something “metallic” you are actually smelling your own skin oils that reacted with the metal ions?

For example, one of the most evolutionarily peculiar sebum compounds we have—sapienic acid—breaks down into distinctive long-chain aldehydes. Incidentally, those aldehydes are key compounds used by human-specialist dengue mosquitoes to find humans (Zhao et al. 2022 Nature).🦟

You probably think body odour comes from sweat and bacteria. (Sure, some does.) But actually, a lot of it comes from sebum (skin oils) broken down by abiotic oxidation. Turns out humans have very strange sebum, which in turn gives us a very strange scent!

Happy to share a new review I wrote with @lindymcbr for @CurrentBiology! If you’ve ever wondered about the source of your stank or just want to learn why humans smell weird (it's true!), then this review is for you! 👃🧪🤔 doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.…

Great study on how human odour differences underlie mosquito attraction (with an awesome large-scale behavioural setup)! Congrats @McMenimanLab, @dags263, @stephrankin2, and team!

Congrats to @lindymcbr, my incredible PhD advisor! Words can't describe what a huge privilege it's been to have her as a mentor! 🤩

@DoctorZen Yes, I did!

@JessicaLZung Did you design this graphic?

How do human-loving mosquitoes find our scent in a complex, smelly world? Read on to learn what different animals smell like and what the structure of odour space can tell us about how brains may encode olfactory information! Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2023.0… @Skotbb @lindymcbr

@flyknows @SKotbb @lindymcbr Thanks! Would love to hear what you think after reading it!

Excited to share our 1st preprint on parrot vocal learning in the @jesseGlab !! We found some surprising differences in an important forebrain circuit between parrots and their evolutionary relatives–songbirds. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Special thanks to the many people who helped me gather samples and especially to my wonderful co-authors @Skotbb and @lindymcbr! ❤️

Odours are complex and hard to work with! But by embracing the complexity and carefully analysing the statistics of natural odour spaces, we can gain fresh insight into how brains encode odour and how olfactory coding evolves.