BSDB/BSCB/JSDB Joint Spring Meeting Report, part two

Tuesday: Cell cycling and growth, stem cells and fate, and medal-winners’ lectures

Buzz Baum opened the cell cycle and growth in development session with a talk about his lab’s work at UCL on cell shape changes during mitosis in dissociated culture and in epithelial sheets. The talk covered cell rounding on entry into mitosis due to actin remodelling and the links between cell shape change and successful mitosis progression. Anna Philpott of the University of Cambridge discussed the regulation of proliferation and differentiation by post-translational modifications, including the accumulation of multi-site phosphorylation events, in neurogenesis.

Alison Lloyd gave a talk on Schwann cell dedifferentiation and proliferation in adult regeneration and the behaviour of proliferative Schwann cells after injury. She also discussed results from a novel mouse model of neurofibroma from her lab at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology and the UCL Cancer Institute. Fumio Matsuzaki of RIKEN CDB described asymmetric, symmetric and the rarely-observed oblique stem cell divisions in the subventricular zone, and their potential involvement in altering the balance of cortical progenitor numbers and promoting brain expansion in mammalian brain evolution.

The second poster session was held over Tuesday lunchtime, concurrent with a seminar on Huygens deconvolution in microscopy sponsored by Scientific Volume Imaging.

Stem cells and cell fate choice were the topics of the afternoon session. The many interesting presentations on stem cell topics in this and other sessions were an excellent reminder of the degree to which stem cell biology is integral to many developmental biology subfields. Sally Lowell’s talk on priming pluripotent cells for differentiation first established an incremental, rather than binary, model for progressive ES cell differentiation, before presenting findings on pro-differentiation signalling and transcription factor interactions. Mario Stavridis, a young PI at Dundee University, gave a fascinating talk on post-translational modification with beta-O-N-acetylated glucosamine, a parallel mechanism to protein phosphorylation that regulates embryonic stem cell differentiation. Berenika Plusa presented wonderful videos of live cell sorting in transgenic mouse blastocysts, showing cell type emergence and behaviour during the establishment of cell fate.

Josh Brickman spoke on lineage priming in embryonic stem cells, looking at the small initial differences in key molecule transcription and translation that prime stem cells to later adopt different fates. Soshei Yoshida from the National institute for Basic Biology, Japan, capped the session with a report on the process of spermatogenic stem cell self-renewal and progressive differentiation in the live mouse testis, discussing  how continuity in mouse spermatogenesis is promoted by the long-term maintenance of a range of undifferentiated progenitor cell types.

The Beddington medal was awarded to Boyan Bonev, who gave an excellent talk on his PhD work in Nancy Papalopulu’s lab on the role of microRNA-9 in neural progenitor development variation in space and time. Mutual regulation and oscillation between microRNA-9 and Hes transcription was found to produce a delayed trigger for neuronal differentiation.

The Waddington medal was presented to Alfonso Martinez-Arias of Cambridge University. As is traditional, his talk provided a retrospective of his life and career, with the inclusion of a number of special effects and musical numbers along with descriptions of his work on key Drosophila developmental pathways and cell fate determination. He closed his talk with words of solidarity for the upcoming generation of young scientists.

The evening graduate symposium was opened by Daphne Verleyen from the University of Leuven, who continued an emerging theme of the conference with her talk on left-right axis formation via cilia behaviour in Kupffer’s vesicle. She described results from a g-protein coupled receptor mutant zebrafish line with axis formation defects. Debbie McIntosh from the University of Dundee spoke on replication fork formation in stressed and cancerous cells, describing the results of a molecular screen on replication fork behaviour. Keliya Bai from the University of Aberdeen talked on epithelial elongation in c. elegans embryos through actin cytoskeleton contraction, and discussed an extensive screen carried out for components of the actin-anchoring complex.

Eight BSDB and BSCB poster prize winners were announced at the conference dinner, including Stephen Fleenor, Ricardo Laranjeiro, Tom Pettini and Jorge Beira. The delicious and social 3-course conference dinner was followed by disco music and dancing, over which a discrete veil will be drawn. A good time was had by all.

Wednesday: in vitro models of development and regeneration

The last session on in vitro models of developmental biology included talks from a number of regenerative medicine biologists, who provided a different perspective on in vitro culture as a tool for clinical applications as well as a model for examining tissue and cell function.

Keith Baar from UC Davis opened the day with his work on growing ligaments for transplant and using cultured ligaments as high throughput test bed for BMPs, FGFs and other combinations of molecules to examine their roles in tendon development. Andrea Vortkamp from University Duisberg-Essen presented results from analysis of chondrocyte development in a mouse mutant model of tricho-rhino-phalangeal syndrome, caused by Trps1 mutation, which is characterised by shortened limbs. The mutation appears to cause defects in cell cycle progression in chondrocytes due to effects on chromatin acetylation levels.

Masayuki Yamamoto from Tokyo Women’s Medical University gave an energetic talk on shyabu-shyabu bioengineering, which creates scaffold-free thin layers of tissue, including cornea, esophageal epithelium and skeletal muscle for human transplant. The culture technique used a polymer with temperature dependant cell-adhering properties, allowing cells and ECM to be harvested as a single sheet with the now-available UpCell dishes. Fiona Watt, head of the Centre for Stem Cell and Regenerative medicine at KCL, finished the conference on a high note with her talk on epidermal stem cell and niche interactions and responses of these groups of cells to microenvironmental cues. Her talk highlighted the research progress made through close collaboration with chemists and bioengineers in producing faithful and incisive in vitro models of the epithelial stem cell niche.

As always, the BSDB Spring meeting was a chance to see a good cross-section of current developmental biology research and – thanks to the BSCB joint meeting – catch up on relevant cell biology topics in the same place. It was also great to meet up with so many people from previous years’ conferences and see how their research has evolved. I look forward especially to seeing JSDB members again in future conferences.

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