Cycles and cell cycles – EMBO meeting day 1

The fourth annual EMBO meeting is currently underway in Nice. I had a few hours to walk around the city before the meeting started, and discovered that Nice is a haven for cyclists, with a network of bicycle paths and a city-wide bike share system. But last night, Nice also became a haven for cell cycle fans, when Paul Nurse gave the opening keynote lecture at the fourth annual EMBO meeting.

Nurse started his talk with a slide of a complicated network of feedback loops of cyclin/CDK regulation, containing all the knowledge we have about which components affect which part of the pathway. “The sole purpose of putting this slide up is to depress you”, he said, but he quickly cheered us up with a more simplified system. His group has studied which parts of the cell cycle pathway are minimally required for particular functions. Using a chimera protein, they were able to show that changing levels of CDK was sufficient for the cell to move from one part of the cell cycle to the next. Nurse emphasized that such studies could also be done for other developmental or cellular systems: when given an extensive network of biological interactions, with multiple feedback loops, it can become very difficult to understand how certain components carry out their role, but by simplifying the system you can find out which processes are relevant for the process that you’re studying.

After the opening keynote, the meeting continued with the first plenary session: Chromatin & chromosomes – the dynamic genome. Three speakers each discussed a different aspect of chromatin dynamics or epigenetic regulation. Steve Henikoff talked about various projects his lab is doing to map nucleosome dynamics and profile epigenetic patterns. Ingrid Grummt focused on epigenetic silencing of rRNA genes. She described a process in which RNA plays a vital role in epigenetic regulation by forming a triplex structure with the two strands of DNA, which then guides a methyltransferase to its target site. The last speaker of the evening, Adrian Bird, illustrated how the study of methyl-CpG interactions is providing insight into Rett Syndrome – an autism spectrum disorder linked to the methyl-CpG-binding protein MeCP2.

The evening closed with a reception and a visit to the exhibition area, where various companies and organisations have set up a stand for the next few days. There were many vendors and publishers, but also a few institutes: You can find out more about the future Francis Crick Centre in London, or about working at St Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis. The Node is there, too, at the Company of Biologists booth just outside the exhibit hall (next to the job board), so do drop by if you’re attending. I’m there occasionally between talks and I love meeting Node readers.

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