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This month on the Node – July 2016

Posted by , on 1 August 2016

In case you missed it, here’s a round up of our July content, with lots of developmental biology research highlights (inc. microfluidics, zebrafinches and 3D retinas), as well as some art, some history, and some opinions. Happy reading!


Research

Christopher Demers wrote about microfluidic chambers and how they can be a useful tool for developmental biologists,  Carloine Dillard introduced her recent work using Drosophila neural stem cells as a model for understanding the developmental origins of tumours, and Aysu Uygur told us what chickens and zebrafinches tell us about how to pattern different-sized tissues.

 

nufig2
Avian development from Aysu’s piece

 

Marcos Simoes-Costa described how a fusion of classical and modern techniques helped to define and control the neural crest, Amelia Lane told the story of  differentiating photoreceptors from patient iPSCs and the great promise the technique has for retinal degeneration, and The DMDD wrote about how Zika has put birth defects in the spotlight.

 

Cranial neural crest cells of a chick embryo. Neural crest cells (purple/blue) can be seen migrating away from the central nervous system (red).
The neural crest from Marcos’ piece

 

Jingi Wu wrote about what ATAC-seq revealed about the chromatin landscape of the early embryo, and Wouter Masselink told us about a new cell type that orchestrates the development of the fin and sheds light on the fin-to limb transition.

 

AFIC infiltration into the AER controls fin fold induction. AFICs have a shared somitic origin with the muscle progenitor pool (green) and migrate into the AER (yellow). Upon infiltration into the AER, the AER folds onto itself and forms the AF (red). This infiltration event is absent in tetrapods such as mouse and chicken. AFICs have a dual role in inducing fin fold formation and secreting collagens needed for actinotrichia formation.
Wouter’s model for fins and limbs

 

Lab life

In our latest ‘Day in the Life’ series, Yoshimasa Hamada gave us an insight into what life is like in a cricket lab, Ngang Heok recounted his time in Singapore thanks to a Development travelling fellowship, and Rachna Narayanan wrote a report from the joint BSCB-BSDB Spring meeting in Warwick.

 

fig1
Crickets from Yoshimasa’s lab

 

History and Art

Máté Varga told the fascinating story of George Streisinger, Hungarian founding father of zebrafish research and social activist (really worth setting aside twenty minutes to read this!)

 

Streisinger
Geogre Streisinger

 

Mark Hintze (developmental biologist) and Diana Gradinaru (artist) introduced their wonderful animation about the questions of developmental biology. The piece really gives wonderful context to the video:

 

 

Brexit

Gary McDowellVicki Metzis and Wouter Picture4Masselink gave us three quite different takes on what Brexit means for them and for science. A month on, all we know is that the uncertainty surrounding the UK science’s future is not going to be short lived.

 

Publishing

We started a new feature: this month in preprints, which aimed to collate and promote the latest devbio & related work deposited in preprint servers in the last month. Look out for July’s selection later today.

 

Jobs

Over on our jobs page, we had postdocs come up in Florida and Cologne, and PhDs in Groningen and Charleroi Brussels.

 

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Categories: Highlights

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