the community site for and by developmental biologists
Posted by benoitbruneau on June 30th, 2010
Ahhh the Node, my favourite part of the embryo: nice cup shape you can lie back in and get a whirly cilia massage…. OK, on with the post. So it seems that everyone is working on stem cells now. They’re all the rage. Students come through for a rotation and ask “do you work on[…]
Posted by Jonathan Slack on June 29th, 2010
This is a question that I keep asking myself. I am starting work on the third edition of my textbook “Essential Developmental Biology”. Over the years the quantity of published material in developmental biology keeps rising exponentially. Papers nowadays are extremely detailed and technical compared to the way they were in the 1980s when the[…]
Posted by Eva Amsen on June 29th, 2010
Have you ever met a Nobel Laureate? 650 lucky young researchers are currently spending the week with 59 previous Nobel Prize winners from the fields of physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry. Each year, a group of Nobel Laureates meet in Lindau, a German town (and island) at Lake Constance, close to the Swiss and[…]
Posted by Eva Amsen on June 28th, 2010
Biomedical researchers in the UK are seeing some changes in the way their research is funded. The Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest charity funding agency for biomedical research, is phasing out the majority of its existing biomedical science grants and replacing them with “Investigator Awards”. The last applications for project grants, programme grants, equipment grants,[…]
Posted by Eva Amsen on June 25th, 2010
Coinciding with the launch of the Node, Development Editor-in-chief Olivier Pourquié, Executive editor Jane Alfred, and the Node’s Community Manager Eva Amsen (that’s me!) wrote an editorial for the current issue of Development. It explains why we set up this site, and who is writing and reading it (that’s you!). The picture I added is[…]
Posted by Ben Steventon on June 23rd, 2010
May 10th 2010 marked the second anniversary of a very young but promising scientific meeting, the Young Embryologist Meeting (YEM). This meeting was organised by a group of PhD students and young post-docs from London interested in developmental biology but open to everyone. Researchers at this level are just beginning to make decisions on what[…]
Posted by Jane Alfred on June 23rd, 2010
If you are a plant developmental biologist studying the Selaginella spikemosses, you might be interested in this beautiful animation that shows the life cycle of the Selaginella, Selaginella apoda Life Cycle: Selaginella apoda from Ciaran Moloney on Vimeo. And if you are captured by the simple beauty of this plant, you might also like a[…]
Posted by Seema Grewal on June 23rd, 2010
Here are the research highlights from the current issue of Development. You can find these on the Development site but we thought it would be useful to have them posted on the Node, too. Brainy signals for actin dynamics During brain development, neurite outgrowth and neuronal migration establish the brain architecture needed for brain function.[…]
Posted by Natascha Bushati on June 21st, 2010
As announced in my last post, here is part two of the BSDB-BSCB Spring Meeting Report. It deals with two presentations on networks of transcription factors (TFs). During development, such dynamic networks of TFs and signaling molecules establish and maintain the spatio-temporal patterns of gene expression characteristic for the developing tissue. Using high throughput approaches[…]
Posted by Shelley Edmunds on June 18th, 2010
I am employed as a graduate teaching assistant for a first year biomedical sciences course at Auckland University in New Zealand. The class is called Cellular and Developmental Biology and my job is to help with tutoring the laboratory classes. For my lab streams I’m the one who stands at the front and gives instructions,[…]
