The SDB-BSDB interview chain: Tamina Lebek and Corie Owen

Each year, the British and US societies for Developmental Biology have their annual meeting, the BSDB meeting is usually in April, the SDB meeting in July. The winner of the student poster prize in each of the meetings gets the chance to go to the other society’s meeting the following year. From 2012 – 2017, the Node got the winners together for an interview chain, and the tradition is now revived here with SDB 2023’s poster prize winner Corie Owen and BSDB’s 2024 poster prize winner Tamina Lebek.

Can you introduce yourselves?

Tamina: I’m Tamina Lebek, a 4^th year PhD student in the lab of Sally Lowell lab at the Institute of Regeneration and Repair (IRR) at the University of Edinburgh.

Corie: I’m Corie Owen, a postdoc in Laurinda Jaffe’s lab at UConn Health Center in Connecticut, USA.

Tamina, congrats on winning the BSDB student poster prize! What was your poster about?

Thank you! My poster was about my PhD work where I developed a new neighbour-labelling system called PUFFFIN to look at how cells communicate with each other. During the final year of my PhD, I used PUFFFIN to investigate mouse embryonic stem cells exiting naïve pluripotency and if they adjust the pace of differentiation to their neighbours.

Tamina, what is the story behind the acronym PUFFFIN?

The acronym stands for Positive Ultra-bright Fluorescent Fusion For Identifying Neighbours because that is what it is and what it does, but the story behind the name actually goes further back. A couple of years ago I saw a post on social media about a repopulation project for puffins on the east coast of the US where they put wooden decoys that look like puffins on smaller islands and because puffin are such social birds they would start nesting there, too, because the decoys suggest it was a safe breeding ground. And the post claimed that the puffins started standing on one leg rather than two as this is what the decoys were doing, being fastened to rocks on a single rod. And I used this as an introductory slide for a talk at our institute to highlight where neighbour labelling would be handy if you wanted to research whether puffins that were close to a decoy are more likely to stand on one leg than those who had not met a decoy. This analogy received great laughs, so Sally started a little competition to come up with an acronym that would make me rename my system to puffin and that was a great success.

Corie, congrats on winning the SDB poster prize! What was your poster about?

Thank you! My poster was about my PhD work as well. We developed a mouse with a hemagluttinin (HA) tag on the endogenous luteinizing hormone receptor, which allowed us to localize cells that expressed the receptor for the first time. Using this mouse, I discovered that granulosa cells in the preovulatory follicle migrate into the interior of the follicle in response to luteinizing hormone. I also characterized structural changes that occur in the preovulatory follicle in the time leading to ovulation that could occur in part due to the migration.

Corie, you get to go to the 2024 BSDB meeting as a poster prize recipient. How was your experience at the meeting? (And what’s the story behind the signed SDB hat??)

It was wonderful! It’s a much smaller meeting than SDB, so it was nice to see great science but also be in an intimate setting. And I loved England – cannot wait to plan another trip back. The hat came from SDB President Ken Cho! He decided that all the award winners needed something more than just a certificate, so he went and bought everyone a prize the night before. I can’t remember what any of the others were, but mine was a white baseball hat signed by some incredible names in developmental biology. They joked that I should bring it with me to BSDB, so naturally it had to make the trip with me!

Tamina, how was your experience at the BSDB meeting?

I just love the BSDB meetings. They are the perfect size, big enough that you can meet so many interesting researchers, and small enough that you get the chance to actually talk to them. There is always an inspiring and varied selection of talks and the party at the end is splendid!

Tamina, what advice would you give students at the early stages of their PhD?

Take every opportunity to present your research, especially in front of an audience with diverse scientific background – someone might have an idea that will bring you a major step forward in your project. Also, think twice about method development as a PhD project.

What would you say is the single experiment or finding that you are most proud of?

Tamina: I spend so much time designing and optimising the system that really the key experiment for me was when we did the flow cytometry (first figure in the paper) that showed us that the system finally works – even better than we expected. I had a brilliant honours student with me at the time and I kept asking her if she can see that too, or if I’m dreaming.

Corie: The finding I am most proud of is the interior migration of the luteinizing hormone receptor expressing cells. It was a total fluke – I was hoping to visualize endocytosis of the receptor after LH stimulation. Instead, I saw that the cells themselves were completely displaced. I had to look at quite a few samples before I ever believed it.

What is your favourite technique?

Tamina: Definitely flow cytometry. So many things you can do with it, and you can get so much data for comparably small effort. My fascination for flow cytometry was also heavily influenced by the head of our facility who is such a great person.

Corie: Confocal microscopy, 100%. I am quite a visual learner and visual person, so being able to see the changes through microscopy is an incredible experience for me. And the images are beautiful!

What is next for you/ What are you currently working on?

Tamina: I still have plenty of ideas for developing PUFFFIN further but at the moment I’m enjoying finally using the system for investigating biological questions. This is also driven by our amazing collaborations – we are hoping to build a PUFFFIN Zoo with neighbour labelling in many different model systems like chick, mouse, drosophila, zebrafish, and xenopus.

Corie: I’m currently working as a postdoc in the same lab I did my PhD in. While my dissertation focused heavily on the granulosa cells that expressed the LH receptor, I became quite interested in other cell types that express the receptor within the ovary. I’m looking forward to exploring those more and trying to understand how they might contribute to female fertility.

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