This month on the Node
Posted by the Node, on 5 September 2016
August was meant to be a quiet month, with researchers (in Europe, at least) leaving the lab for a well earned break and winding down before the start of the academic year…but here on the Node we’ve had another bumper month full of diverse content. Happy reading!
Meetings
We had a wonderful report from Joaquín Navajas Acedo, Aleisha Symon and Tsai-Ming Lu from the Woods Hole Embryology Course. They really managed to capture the intense excitement and slight mania of the course, and I’m sure made a lot of readers eager to sign up for next year. I reported from the BSD-ISD in Boston: a fantastic conference, and a wonderful city. I also got to meet Yusuff and Mathew who carried on the SDB-BSDB interview chain (long may it continue!).
Research
We found out about how mechanical signals influence stem cell fate, the link between sex, hormones and stem cells, the genomic changes that accompany multicellularity, the effects of aging on stem cell niches, and, in our latest ‘Day in the life…’ post, what it’s like to work on sponges in Brazil. I also had the pleasure of revisiting a forgotten classic: Maria de la Cruz’s lineage tracing in the heart.
Meeting people is easy…
We started a new series to complement our usual research posts: The People Behind the Papers, highlighting the faces behind recent exciting developmental biology papers. We started with an interdisciplinary team from Heidelberg who uncovered how nuclear pore complexes get into the nuclear envelope, and then featured Thomas Lozito, author of a recent Development paper on lizard tail regeneration.
Research aides
The folks from DMDD told us about their latest batch of data, and we found out about FaceBase, a free online resource for craniofacial researchers. At the end of the month, Helena Jambor told us why we should never, ever use bar plots for statistical data.