SEBD Meeting (GfE 2026)

Posted by Girish Kale, on 24 March 2026

Recently, I attended the biennial meeting of the German Society for Developmental Biology (GfE). This was my second time attending one of these meetings, and I was looking forward to it, having missed the last one a couple of years ago. Everyone from my scientific circle, here in Germany, thinks of these meetings as having a homely feeling with a close-knit familial atmosphere, and this meeting was no different. The meeting this time was even more special with members of the Dutch (DSDB) and Spanish (SEBD) societies joining in as well.

The meeting took place in Potsdam over the course of 4 days, on a university campus: a welcome trend in the GfE meetings, where the meetings are typically organised in an academic backdrop, instead of a commercial conference center. I believe this is a great strategy to keep registration fees low, making the meeting widely accessible to the community. With plenty of coffee and food to go around, the meeting struck a nice balance between great science and the time to digest it all.

These meetings are always a great opportunity to reconnect with your local scientific network. Having attended one of the previous iterations, I was looking forward to seeing some of my old colleagues. I am sure many others were also able to interact with colleagues from Spain and the Netherlands, creating new connections. With about 150 participants, the meeting was just the right size to not be overwhelming, with the international crowd finding ample opportunities to intermingle. The relatively small size naturally obviates the need for having parallel sessions, thus not forcing one to make the difficult choice of missing out on interesting talks. Despite its small size, the meeting had a significant presence on social media, with #GfE2026 trending on the feeds.

Covering topics from the basics of embryonic development to disease modeling, the conference showcased the latest and greatest in classical model systems, as well as emerging ones. As usual, the presence of in vitro embryo models was noteworthy, with a concerted drive towards increasing throughput and reproducibility in these systems. Surprisingly, -omics techniques (especially, single-cell RNA-Seq) were a bit underrepresented, giving the impression that perhaps the community has now gotten over the novelty-driven early excitement. Instead, there was an exciting abundance of talks and posters focusing on the role of mechanical regulation in biological systems (cell-, tissue- mechanics, mechanical manipulations and characterizations, etc.) at all stages of development.

Speaking of posters: while the quality of the posters was excellent, the duration of the poster sessions left something to be desired. Given how well organised this meeting was, commenting about shorter poster sessions feels nitpicky. However, there seems to be a broader emerging trend in conferences that needs to be addressed: more often than not, the space for poster sessions is limited, preventing the presenters from displaying the posters throughout the meeting. It is disheartening to have one’s poster propped up for a couple of days at best, not getting the attention that it deserves, after having spent hours preparing it. We, as a community, need to make a change and Make Poster-sessions Great Again: poster sessions should not feel like an afterthought. Participants should be allowed to display and celebrate their work throughout the meeting, with even- vs. odd-numbered posters being presented in different poster sessions. In any case, I particularly appreciated the novelty of many of the findings presented in talks and posters, with many unpublished results, whether completely new or freshly available as preprints.

One of the highlights of the conference was the PhD Award Lecture by Tatiana Lebedeva and the Hilde Mangold Award Lecture by Maik Bischoff. Tatiana walked us through her experiments with Nematostella vectensis embryos, where she focused on germ layer specification and gastrulation. It was great to see her grit and optimism despite the painstakingly difficult journey of trying to create transgenic animals to visualize β-catenin expression in embryos of this species. Maik talked about his work on the emergence of chirality in biological systems through tissue interactions. Although working with Drosophila melanogaster – a conventional model organism – he demonstrated how the field needs to use these experimental systems to ask increasingly challenging questions. Listening to these and other talks, I couldn’t help but wonder about the future of model organisms in developmental biology research. While research on non-model species is a necessary challenge and a welcome change for the field, work by Maik and others at the conference showed that model organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster still have their relevance. We are certainly in an age in which what was once frontier research in model organisms is now a territory being increasingly captured by non-model organisms. The only way to keep these conventional models relevant is to ask increasingly challenging questions and push the limits of what was once possible. (See this recent preprint, which talks about diminishing representation of model organisms in scientific literature over the past couple of decades, and what that might mean for the future of basic and applied research in biology.)

Thankfully, the weather was somewhat on our side, with some sunshine allowing us to sit outdoors during lunch times. The conference dinner on the waterfront was exceptional: I don’t remember having had better food at a conference in recent memory, and from what I hear, I missed out on a similarly excellent food during the last meeting. Keeping up with the tradition, the dance party followed, with great music till 1 am, when we were gently “forced” out of the restaurant. I suppose the next meeting (in 2028 at Heidelberg) has a lot to live up to.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Alex Eve and Verena Kaul for comments. Cover image, courtesy of meeting organisers and Ingrid Lohmann.