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developmental and stem cell biologists

This month on the Node – June 2016

Posted by , on 1 July 2016

This month we welcomed Aidan to the Node, who took over from Cat as Community Manager, and introduced himself here. He’s been enjoying settling in to the Company of Biologists office, and getting to know the site and its users.

We had 17 jobs and studentships posted on our jobs page,  on everything from chromatin to membrane dynamics. We also had a host of other posts covering a typically wide range of content:

 

Research

SEM picture of a cross-section of a small cotton flower bud (looking up towards the tip) showing how the petals are folded over one another and their trichomes entangled.Julia Turan wrote about the visualisation of stem cell signalling in the gut, and how organoids are helping us understand the Zika virus. Alexa Burger told us about her Development paper on efforts to maximise the efficiency of CRISPR in zebrafish. Danny Llewellyn told us about how trichomes can bind plant organs together to constrain their shape, and how the story came about.

 

Research Methods

We posted an excerpt from a Disease Models and Mechanisms article focusing on the problems of reproducibility in histopathology (many of the issues raised apply broadly to developmental biology research). We also reposted an article from Nathalie Percie du Sert on the Experimental Design Assistant: an online tool aimed at scientists who use animals in their research.

 

Meetings/Courses

DSC_0092We heard about the Young Embryologist Network meeting in London from two perspectives: Thomas Butts, and Vicki Metzis & Katherine Exelby. From Michigan, Eden, Martha, Samahitha and David introduced the Developing Future Biologists programme, and the course they ran over the summer for Puerto Rican undergraduates.

 

Lab life

figure08Our ‘A day in the life…’ series continued, and we first learned about what life is like in a gar lab. Martin Minarik journeys from Prague to Mexico to harvest eggs from these non-teleost fishes. We then shifted from the humid tropics to the clean room, where one PhD student fabricates microelectrodes for neuroscience applications.

 

Campaigns/Questions

We reposted a piece from the Genetics Society of America campaigning for the maintenance of funding for model organism databases (such as Flybase and ZFIN); you can sign the Letter of Support by following the link in the piece.

 

Finally, wPicture4e asked our Questions of the Month, which really couldn’t have been about anything else: what does the UK referendum result mean to you as a scientist, and what can we as a community do about it? Get involved here. We also created a page with a bunch of post-referendum links.

 

Thanks to all our posters and readers!

 

 

 

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