the community site for and by developmental biologists
Posted by Linda on December 31st, 2010
Let me take you on a Bioluminescent journey across many kingdoms. If you’re not well acquainted with the term, it’s the ability of living things to chemically produce light. It’s also a natural widespread feature to many organisms, from jellyfish to algae, fireflies to fungi. In recent years, it’s become a standard molecular biological tool for[…]
Posted by Eva Amsen on December 30th, 2010
Each year in early December, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute hosts a series of educational seminars, called the Holiday Lectures, in which researchers explain the very basic concepts of their work. The lectures make a great introduction to a topic, and all past lectures are available on the HHMI Biointeractive site or as DVDs for[…]
Posted by Olivier Pourquie on December 29th, 2010
(This is the editorial from Development’s first issue of 2011. It first appeared on the Development site on December 7, 2010.) As I wrote in last year’s editorial, developmental biology is facing a major revolution with the emergence of the stem cell field, to which many of our best scientists are drawn. Thus, one of[…]
Posted by Eva Amsen on December 23rd, 2010
This is the first in a series of posts about careers outside of academic research. See here for more information. To start the series on alternative careers, I’m going to share the story of how I ended up as community manager of the Node. But first I need to bring up a pet peeve: I[…]
Posted by Linda on December 22nd, 2010
The other beauty of Fluorescent Reporter Gene Systems is its unbearable likeness to holiday colours.
Posted by Eva Amsen on December 22nd, 2010
(This interview by Kathryn Senior originally appeared in Development on December 21, 2010) Ben Scheres is an expert in plant development. He has been investigating development in Arabidopsis at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, since 1990, where his group uses the root tip as an easily accessible supply of plant stem cells. Ben agreed to be[…]
Posted by Seema Grewal on December 21st, 2010
Boning up on stem cell Igf2-P2 function The insulin-like growth factor (IGF)/insulin signalling pathway regulates cell proliferation, differentiation, aging and life span. During embryonic development, transcription of the mouse and human Igf2 gene is tightly regulated by four alternative promoters whose specific roles are unclear. Now, Sylvie Nathalie Hardouin and colleagues reveal that the transcriptional[…]
Posted by Eva Amsen on December 21st, 2010
Some of the most popular posts on the Node have been those about career prospects for young scientists. The category pages for job ads and career posts are among the most visited parts of the site, but neither of them has had as many hits as the discussion titled “too many postdocs and PhD students?”[…]
Posted by Eva Amsen on December 16th, 2010
With people in many countries preparing to take a few days off at the end of this month, and other countries starting their summer break, I’m sure many of you have had to deal with the stress of handling your experiments over the holidays. How do you explain to a tank of zebrafish or a[…]
Posted by Heather on December 16th, 2010
Webcasting is a new art that is still being perfected, but which holds great promise for scientific collaboration at both small and large scales.
