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Developmental Biology Bingo GameWe made a bingo game! You all left many suggestions for words to include in a developmental biology bingo game, and BenchFly turned that into a playable game. Visit their site to download bingo cards for everyone in your lab.
SDB CoRe
The SDB has set up a collaborative resource for teaching materials to use in developmental biology courses, and they are looking for submissions. Do you have great visuals that can be used in undergraduate teaching? Let Marsha Lucas know. She left more information in her post earlier this week.
Research
Just before Christmas, Hillel Kugler, of Microsoft Research, wrote about a project he worked on with Jane Albert Hubbard’s lab at the Skirball Institute.
“In our study, published in Development, we have built a computational model of germline development in C. elegans. In this model, germ cells move, divide, respond to signals, progress through mitosis and meiosis, and differentiate according to a developmental program specified for a “cell”. This developmental program incorporates cellular decision-making that influences germ cell behavior, as defined by a subset of cell components and their dynamic interactions.”
Other research recently covered on the Node included a paper that showed that a small change in bioelectric signals is enough to induce eye development in Xenopus, and an image highlighting the importance of Notch signaling in stem cell self-renewal and intestinal homeostasis.
Write for the Node
If you’re interested in writing for the Node, all you have to do is create an account and wait for approval. But sometimes inspiration is the limiting factor. If you’d love to write, and just want some suggestions and ideas, you can fill out this form, and we’ll occasionally send you some ideas. The first email has gone out this week, but if you sign up now, you’ll get that sent as soon as possible.
Books
Finally, we saw a few more book reviews this month. The last of the Development book reviews went up, in which Wendy Bickmore reviews “The Nucleus” (Edited by Tom Misteli and David L. Spector). We started 2012 with the first Node-exclusive book review: Sasha Terashiva reviewed “The Cell: A Very Short Introduction” (by Terence Allen and Graham Cowling).
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Benchfly
“Our paper provides a practical definition of the range of a morphogen gradient, a statistical procedure for estimating this range, a demonstration of this procedure in practice, and several independent experimental tests of derived estimates. From the biological standpoint, the range of a gradient can be viewed as the distance over which it acts as a spatial regulator of cell responses.”
For the past 14 years, the web comic Piled Higher and Deeper has looked specifically at the ups and downs of graduate student life. The comic is now a movie, and the Node had a chance to 
Sasha Terashima 
“At the end of the day, when people believe that a human embryo from the time of conception is worthy of all protection, you cannot argue against that. All I can argue is that we are in a situation where human embryos through IVF programmes are discarded, and isn’t it more ethically acceptable to use those discarded embryos to help save human lives in the future?” – 
“We think of proteins and genes, but there are all also lipids and sugars, and we are ignoring them completely! Maybe the future could be to measure them, find out where they are and how they influence things. Chemistry could be the future.” - 
“The reality is that model systems, at least in the fields we work in, exist not because it has anything to do with generality, but because experiments were easy to do in them.” – 
