A team of preLights selectors respond to a meta-analysis of bioRxiv preprints.

Gautam Dey, Zhang-He Goh, Lars Hubatsch, Maiko Kitaoka, Robert Mahen, Máté Palfy, Connor Rosen and Samantha Seah*

*all authors contributed equally; cross-posted from here.

The growing adoption of preprints over the last five years in the biological sciences has driven discussion within the academic community about the merits, goals, and potential downsides of disseminating work prior to peer review. However, the community has lacked a systematic bibliometric analysis (Figure 1) of preprints in which to root these discussions. Abdill and Blekhman¹ have generated an analysis of the data to identify trends in preprint usage, popularity, and outcomes, and created the website rxivist.org to facilitate future analysis and to provide an alternative platform for discovering actively discussed preprints.

As members of the preLights community who support the increased uptake of – and discussion about – preprints in the life sciences, we have taken this opportunity to reflect on how preprint success can be measured, and what the data provided by Abdill and Blekhman tell us about preprints in the life sciences.

 

What makes a preprint successful?

Citation rates have long served as the bibliometric gold standard for measuring the scientific impact of publications. However, follow-up studies and reviews can take years to make their own appearance in the literature, meaning that the impact of any one study based on citations can only be assessed in the long term (read: years to decades).

Standing in sharp contrast to this slow, cumulative view of scientific impact, the core goal of preprints is to accelerate the dissemination of scientific observations – to promote discussion, collaboration, and quick follow-up. In this sense, the ability of a preprint to reach the scientific community quickly and effectively is perhaps the ultimate measure of its success.

This alternate perspective justifies Abdill and Blekhman’s use of preprint downloads, Twitter activity and eventual publication outcomes as key quantitative metrics of preprint success, but these naturally raise some questions as well. Is using Twitter to define “popularity” acceptable? Our experience suggests Twitter is indeed the dominant social media platform for spreading preprints – but this does raise the possibility of excluding communities of scientists, and their opinions, based on a lack of Twitter presence. Our hope is that preprint curation platforms (such as preLights) will play an ever more important role in dissemination.

As with all bibliometric methods, it is important to keep in mind the potential for manipulation or misuse – as summarised in Goodhart’s Law, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure². While we applaud the introduction of quantitative measures for preprint “success” in the rxivist project and the enablement of detailed analyses conducted by the authors, we are mindful that a small number of metrics should not be used to define a preprint without critical engagement and evaluation.

Social media and the dissemination of science

The use of Twitter activity as a metric for popularity of preprints on the rxivist website helps flag some issues of interest. First, biases in research communication using social media are poorly understood. For example, among scientists active on Twitter, there is widespread variation in the number of their Twitter followers³. As such, the interests of a single popular scientific influencer could potentially drive far greater disparities than are reflected in quality.

Second, preprinting opens up a space – until recently unexplored – for community engagement, spanning the gap between the dissemination of the authors’ unfiltered data and ideas, and the final peer-approved version. The bulk of this engagement takes place on social media platforms like Twitter. While the informal, loose, and relatively egalitarian structure of communicating this way can be immensely liberating, it is also easy to get lost in the noise, or to simply be overwhelmed by information overload. It is possible to go to sleep in the UK and miss a wide-ranging and critical discussion about a preprint taking place in US time zones – by the time you wake up, Twitter has moved on to the next big thing. In a world of science dissemination via social media, preprint curation and journal club initiatives (and the biorXiv comments section) must take on a critical role – that of providing a stable platform for sustained, publicly recorded engagement while remaining responsive to the abbreviated timescales driven by social media.

What happens, then, after the first few weeks, when the tweetstorms have settled, and the commentaries have been posted? We explore this in more detail below.

Time to publication

The eventual publication outcomes of preprints – their appearance in some peer-reviewed journal – feature heavily in the metrics utilised by Abdill and Blekhman. The authors found that two-thirds of bioRxiv preprints posted between 2013 and the end of 2016 were eventually published in peer-reviewed form. This high rate indicates that authors tend to post quality preprints, therefore initial fears that work not meeting certain scientific standards might ‘clog’ bioRxiv appear to be unfounded. The median time from the posting of a preprint on bioRxiv to its final publication in a peer-reviewed journal was just under six months, although this varied substantially, depending on the eventual journal of publication (Figure 2). In terms of accelerating science, pushing forward the public dissemination of new information by an average of six months could be considered a significant success- especially for early-career researchers, for whom six months represents a large fraction of their total career progress. Having their work and ideas publicly available enables them to receive feedback earlier and prepare effectively for career transitions.

However, as Abdill and Blekhman point out, “time-to-publication” is influenced by a plethora of factors, including journal behavior, when preprints are posted in the publication process, and whether preprints are ever published at all.

It’s worth noting that the two “slowest” and the two “fastest” journals (in terms of time from bioRxiv posting to final publication) both fall within the field of genetics and genomics – Genetics and G3 on the “fast” end and Nature Genetics and Genome Research on the “slow” end. This suggests that field-specific attitudes and norms about preprint usage do not drive the difference in publication times by journal.

Preprints can be posted at many stages of the publication process. More field-specific data on when authors typically post preprints would help us understand how authors are utilising preprints – are they sharing work as close to publication as possible, or aiming to get feedback on their work prior to submitting it to a journal? Although the total number of infractions appears to be small, it’s worth noting that some authors appear to be flaunting the bioRxiv guidelines that state that preprints must be uploaded prior to acceptance in a journal.

Publication as a readout of preprint quality

The authors find a significant correlation between preprint download counts and the impact factor of the eventual journal of publication. This suggests that the popularity of a preprint reflects the eventual perceived impact and quality of the work, and that there is some informal consensus among the scientific community about the scientific quality of both published and unpublished preprints. However, the authors rightly point out that publication, particularly in a high profile journal, may actually drive further downloads. Additionally, both metrics are susceptible to biases that distort the connection between popularity and quality – name recognition of the principal investigator, or “hot” topics within a field, for example. Therefore, further validation will be needed to determine how precisely this measure correlates with the scientific utility of a preprint. For instance, it will be interesting to examine whether the number of downloads a preprint receives in its first month holds predictive value for eventual publication.

On the other end of the scale, what about preprints that are never published in peer-reviewed form? Missing links to final publications in the rxivist website and analysis may be partly a technical issue – changes in authors or preprint title make it difficult for automated formats to match preprints to their final publications – but this is unlikely to account for many preprints. Instead, of greater concern is whether these unpublished preprints are of lower quality and are constructed on the back of poor science that would not pass the stringency of peer review. We argue that a lack of final publication should not be held as an indictment of the quality of a preprint. First, preprints help to communicate results more rapidly, particularly in instances where matching a manuscript to typical journal expectations may be difficult or impossible – for example, following the departure of the primary author from a lab. Second, preprints can serve as useful repositories of negative results, which often remain unpublished – after all, “a negative result is still a result”. Therefore, preprints communicating preliminary or shorter stories can prompt discussion and study in the field and be as successful as those that lead to full publication, especially if they invalidate previous hypotheses or drive changes in research that lead in different directions.

Conclusion

The explosive rise of bioRxiv preprints in the life sciences since 2013 has clearly demonstrated the importance of increased speed and visibility through the publishing process. Leveraging social media has also been key to this process. The rxivist project is a laudable effort to collect and collate data on preprint usage, which can in turn be used to measure the influence and uptake of preprints in the life sciences, while he rxivist website makes this data easily accessible and allows others to easily interact with the metadata. We believe the data indicate that preprints are generally successful and that their increasing adoption is a positive trend for not just the life sciences, but science as a whole. While the metrics for preprints diverge from those used for standard peer-reviewed publications, this appropriately reflects the difference between the standards and goals for preprints and that of peer-reviewed journal articles. We thank the authors of the rxivist project for their work, and are excited to watch as our understanding of preprint publishing continues to grow in the future.

References

1. Abdill, R. J. & Blekhman, R. Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprints. bioRxiv 515643 (2019). doi:10.1101/515643
2. Biagioli, M. Watch out for cheats in citation game. Nature 535, 201–201 (2016).
3. Côté, I. M. & Darling, E. S. Scientists on Twitter: Preaching to the choir or singing from the rooftops? FACETS 3, 682–694 (2018).

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

In the latest episode of Genetics Unzipped, Kat Arney is exploring some more of the leading 100 ideas in genetics. She’s been digging around in the genetic vegetable patch in search of flavourful GM tomatoes, chunky onion genomes and Mendelian peas.

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

3 year-POSTDOC + Starting grant (OPEN-CALL BEATRIU de PINOS program) to join our lab on EvoDevoGenomics in Barcelona

We are seeking candidates to join our lab to study our favorite chordate model Oikopleura dioica, in which we are currently interested in heart and muscle development, tail elongation and the impact of gene loss on the evolution of gene regulatory signalling networks. Click here for a tour “A day in our lab” posted in The Node

We have also engaged a new EcoEvoDevo line investigating if the developmental mechanisms of marine embryos are ready to respond to climate change, including biotoxins derived from algal blooms. Click here for a tour on this new EcoEvoDevo adventure.

Our approaches include RNAseq, CRISPR, RNAi, Fluorescent-Microscopy

DEADLINE call: March 4th 2019 (contact for enquiries as soon as possible canestro@ub.edu)

REQUIREMENT: to have defended the PhD within the period January 1st 2011 – December 31st 2016

DURATION:  3 years: starting not later than February 2020

FUNDING: 132.300€ total gross salary for 3 years + 12.000€ research funds

CONTACT: Interested candidates, please send an email to Cristian Cañestro (canestro@ub.edu), including a brief letter of interest, a brief CV, including list of publications with their impact, and technical skills for post-doc applications, and official scores for doctoral candidates, all together in ONE single pdf file.

More info please visit our web: http://bit.ly/2S1PNa8

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

The Company of Biologists, as well as publishing Development and four other journals and offering travel and conference grants, runs a successful series of Workshops. The Workshops provide leading experts and early career scientists from a diverse range of scientific backgrounds with a stimulating environment for the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary ideas. The programmes are carefully developed and are intended to champion the novel techniques and innovations that will underpin important scientific advances.

The Workshop Committee are currently seeking proposals for Workshops to be held during 2021. The deadline for applications is 31 May 2019.

Find out more here:

biologists.com/workshops/propose-new-workshop/

If you want to get a feel for what a Workshop is like, check out this recent video:

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

The story behind our recent Nature paper ‘A male-expressed rice embryogenic trigger redirected for asexual propagation through seeds‘

For sexually reproducing organisms, the diploid life cycle starts with the fusion of a sperm cell with an egg cell. This process, known as fertilization, results in the formation of a zygote, the first diploid cell from which a multicellular embryo develops. In animals, embryo initiation has been shown to be under maternal control, driven by the gene products stored in the egg cytoplasm. For example, in the absence of zygotic transcription, Caenorhabditis elegans zygotes can progress to the 100 cell stage before arresting¹. This raises an important question: if the maternal gene products are able to drive embryo development, why do egg cells depend on sperm cell fertilization for embryo initiation? Why is there a fertilization block in sexual organisms?

This work was started in the Sundaresan lab at UC Davis to understand embryo initiation in rice, particularly the role of BABY BOOM (BBM) genes in it. BBM genes belong to AP2 family of transcription factors.  Our previous study showed that the expression of three BBM genes is induced in zygotes after fertilization². Among these, BBM1 was specifically expressed from the male allele (Fig. 1). Although this was an important observation, it needed further confirmation. We attempted confocal imaging of intact zygotes expressing BBM-GFP, but when BBM-GFP plants were used as either the male or the female parent, it did not work: rice carpels are thick and green, so the GFP signal was impossible to view through this tissue. Isolating zygotes is possible in rice and had been done by our team previously, but it is a tedious process which involves manual dissection. Isolating and imaging a statistically significant number of zygotes for our purpose would have probably taken us a year or more, so we decided to use antibodies against GFP to detect the BBM1-GFP expression in zygotes. However, this created another challenge- is immunohistochemistry sensitive enough to detect the expression in a single nucleus? It did work, and it worked well!

We could now confirm that BBM1 is expressed only from the male allele in zygotes, immediately after fertilization (Fig. 1). We also found that ectopic overexpression of BBM1 induces somatic embryogenesis in heterologous tissues like leaves. The latter observation, combined with male-specific expression of BBM1 in the early zygotes, lead us to hypothesize that BBM1 expression probably initiates embryogenesis after fertilization. To test this hypothesis, we drove the expression of BBM1 in egg cells using an Arabidopsis egg cell promoter³. At that time (back in 2014), we were not even sure if this promoter was going to work in rice. Egg cell expression of BBM1 resulted in embryo formation without the need for fertilization, a process known as parthenogenesis. Thus, it turns out that the sperm cell transmitted BBM1 initiates embryogenesis after fertilization (Fig.1). BBM-like genes were first discovered in Brassica microspore cultures⁴. Although, BBM-like genes from Arabidopsis and Brassica have been shown to induce somatic embryogenesis⁴, their role is zygotic embryogenesis is not known because their loss-of-function mutants do not show any embryonic phenotypes.

The variety of rice that we use for our experiments, Kitaake, has one of the shortest generation times among different experimental varieties of rice (still about four months!). However, generating new transgenic lines from tissue culture can take up to 8 months. So, using rice for studying genetics can be a lengthy affair. However, we decided to take this long path and study the genetics of BBM genes in rice. The vectors for CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing were provided by Dr. Bing Yang from Iowa State University. We created a single knockout mutant of BBM1, but it did not show any phenotype (Fig. 2a). The double mutant of BBM1 and BBM3 (bbm1 bbm3) did not show any embryonic phenotype either (Fig 2a). An attempt to create a triple mutant using a single CRISPR-Cas9 construct was unsuccessful as the triple knockout construct would not regenerate plants in the tissue culture. This was a setback; however, it also meant that triple mutant is probably embryo lethal. To work around this, we created another double mutant of BBM2 and BBM3 (bbm2 bbm3), crossed it with bbm1 bbm3 double mutant and selfed the progeny for the next two generation (Fig. 2b). The triple mutant was indeed embryo lethal (Fig. 2b). But instead of observing a typical 25% lethality (expected from Mendelian genetics), because the mother plant was segregating only for BBM1 (BBM1/bbm1 bbm2/bbm2 bbm3/bbm3), there was a 36% lethality. This was found to be linked to the male transmission of BBM1 from the sperm cell (Fig. 1). This proves that a functional copy of BBM1 from the sperm cell is essential for embryo initiation in rice. This is a novel mechanism that explains why the egg cell (at least in rice) depends on sperm cell fertilization to initiate embryo development.

This work was started purely as a development biology project, but we soon realized this understanding of the basic mechanism of embryo initiation can have agricultural applications. The first application is the conversion of egg cell directly into an embryo without fertilization: it meant we could generate haploid plants. Haploids have only one set of chromosomes, in this case maternal. This makes them efficient agricultural breeding tools as homozygous lines can be produced in one generation after chromosome doubling, bypassing the several generations it takes by inbreeding procedures. The technique we developed does not involve the tedious and laborious tissue culture techniques used in microspore cultures or rescuing and culturing haploid embryos in subsequent generations as seen in wide crossing procedures. The haploids can be grown simply from functional seeds (Fig. 3a).

The second application is synthetic apomixis by which an unreduced diploid egg cell is converted into a maternal clone, allowing for the maintenance of hybrid vigor. Hybrid vigor, or heterosis refers to the increase in yield, growth or other quantitative characteristics in F1 hybrids, compared to parental inbred lines. However, the genetic combinations that lead to this vigor in F1 hybrids, segregate in the F2 generation due to sexual reproduction and thus resulting in loss of vigor. For this reason, farmers need to buy hybrid seeds, every sowing season. Therefore, a hybrid crop that could self-reproduce through seeds while maintaining the parental heterozygosity would solve this problem.

During sexual reproduction, meiosis results in recombination and segregation of genetic traits, and fertilization creates new genetic combinations. MiMe (mitosis instead meiosis), is a genetic approach that skips meiosis and converts meiotic cell division into a mitotic like division⁵. This approach was developed by our collaborator, Raphael Mercier’s group at INRA France. We combined MiMe with our BBM1 induced parthenogenesis system. The two approaches together produced progenies which have the same genetic constitution as that of the mother plant. In other words, the progenies are genetic clones of the mother plant (Fig. 3b). The MiMe produces diploid egg cells which parthenogenetically develop into embryos due to BBM1 expression. The clonal nature of progeny and mother plant was confirmed by whole genome sequencing (Dr. Debra Skinner analyzed the sequences). The endosperm that developed was, however, sexual. Since the gametes are diploid, the endosperm in progenies is hexaploid instead of the usual triploid. This 6X endosperm increases the seed size (Fig. 4a). Thus, this synthetic apomixis approach not only results in clonal propagation but also increases the seed size and hence the yield. This mode of apomixis is seen in some naturally apomictic plants like Boechera⁶ and others. Engineering apomixis in crop plants ensures fixation of hybrid vigor and stabilization of superior heterozygous genotypes. Also, the yield, quality and exchange of vegetatively propagated true seed crops can been improved by introgression of apomixis (hence seed propagation) as the accumulation of somatic mutations, viruses, and other pathogens over successive generations can be avoided. The successful engineering of apomixis in crop plants is a significant step towards achieving the food security for growing world population.

A major challenge we faced during this study was to be able to genotype the thousands of rice plants used in this study (Fig. 4b). The plants needed to be genotyped for T-DNA insertions, copy number determination and CRISPR-Cas9 mutation analysis (quite often for three genes in the same plant). We highly appreciate the helping hand from Bao Nguyen (now at UC Santa Cruz) and Alina Yalda. Preparing samples for flow cytometry for ploidy determination was another time-consuming procedure. However, the final outcome of being able to decipher the mechanism of sexual reproduction in rice and utilization of this knowledge to make it reproduce asexually, made it all worth the effort!

References

1 Edgar, L. G., Wolf, N. & Wood, W. B. Early transcription in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos. Development 120, 443-451 (1994).

2 Anderson, S. N. et al. The Zygotic Transition Is Initiated in Unicellular Plant Zygotes with Asymmetric Activation of Parental Genomes. Developmental cell 43, 349-358 e344, doi:10.1016/j.devcel.2017.10.005 (2017).

3 Steffen, J. G., Kang, I. H., Macfarlane, J. & Drews, G. N. Identification of genes expressed in the Arabidopsis female gametophyte. The Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology 51, 281-292, doi:10.1111/j.1365-313X.2007.03137.x (2007).

4 Boutilier, K. et al. Ectopic expression of BABY BOOM triggers a conversion from vegetative to embryonic growth. The Plant cell 14, 1737-1749 (2002).

5 Mieulet, D. et al. Turning rice meiosis into mitosis. Cell research 26, 1242-1254, doi:10.1038/cr.2016.117 (2016).

6 Rojek, J. et al. Establishing the cell biology of apomictic reproduction in diploid Boechera stricta (Brassicaceae). Annals of botany 122, 513-539, doi:10.1093/aob/mcy114 (2018).

(4 votes)

Loading...

DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS

Position for Special Scientist (Postdoc)

Title:  Post-Doctoral Researcher Cell Biology-MechanoBiology

No. of Positions:One (1) position

Full Time one year employment contract (renewable for three years)

Location: University of Cyprus

The University of Cyprus (www.ucy.ac.cy) invites applications for one full time postdoctoral associate to work in the Laboratory of Cell and Developmental Biology (http://xeno.biol.ucy.ac.cy).

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

The researcher will be part of a team working on a highly ambitious Research Promotion Foundation Strategic Infrastructure grant that aims to establish super-resolution microscopy in Cyprus and explore questions related to how cells sense and respond to mechanical stimuli. These will be addressed using cutting edge instrumentation and methodologies both in vitro and in vivo. The team will go on to employ the principles revealed by these studies for the development of novel therapeutic approaches for the treatment of cancer and metastatic disease, biomedical applications and in regenerative medicine. The post-doctoral associate will also be responsible for supervision of PhD and MSc candidates participating in the project, together with the group leader.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD Degree in Cell or Molecular Biology or related area
• An excellent research and academic record
• Previous laboratory experience and knowledge of basic molecular and cellular biology techniques
• Research experience in the areas of cell biology and/or mechanobiology
• Ambition, enthusiasm and motivation, with an interest in a long-term career in research
• Good publication record

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

All applications must include:

• A cover letter, that describes how the applicant meets both the selection criteria and their motivation
• Curriculum Vitae, including description of past research experience
• Name and contact details of at least two referees
• Qualified applicants will be invited for a personal interview

TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT

The position will be funded through the grant INFRASTRUCTURES/1216/0060 andinitiated on a year-long contract, renewable annually for 3 years. It will include a competitive compensation package, depending on the candidate’s qualifications and experience. The monthly salary is set between €2200- €2700, depending on the candidate’s qualifications and experience. Employee and employer contributions will be deducted from the above amount. 13th Salary bonus or medical insurance coverage are not provided, but the candidate can be included in the UCY health plan if they choose to do so.

Contact information

Applications must be emailed to skourip@ucy.ac.cy by 5th February 2019, with the title “Postdoc position-MRU-2019”.

For more information please contact the coordinator of the project Dr. Paris A. Skourides tel.: +357-22892895 or email: skourip@ucy.ac.cy.

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

Applications for Embryology 2019 are due on February 1.

Apply here!

In this post, I share how I learned about the Embryology course, what made me apply and what I brought back from it.

Nerdy embryology t-shirts

A couple of months ago, I was attending a scientific conference on cell fate in Roscoff, northern France. While waiting in line at the coffee break, I hear someone commenting on the t-shirt that I was wearing:

«I assume you went to the Embryology course in Woods Hole this year! You know, many people here have one of these…»

That is how I met Dominique Bergmann, plant developmental biologist at Stanford University, as she was noticing the many names and embryos on the back of my 2018 Embryology Course t-shirt. «I can’t find mine anymore, but in my case that’s from many many years ago», she later added.

Despite of the years though,  many people have been meticulously collecting those t-shirts. In fact, some of the scientists who I met this summer would have collections spanning decades. I remember Andres Collazo talking about how he strived to keep them in perfect conditions in order to showcase them every year, once back to the Marine Biological Laboratory for Embryology. I now understand why: each of those t-shirts tells multiple stories. Stories of science of course, but also of people who decided, that year, to spend six weeks sharing their passion for developmental biology.

A historical subject

During my undergraduate years I was lucky enough to find this passion. I studied biotechnology at the University of Palermo, in my italian hometown. Among the many courses, I still remember very clearly the only developmental biology class, taught by Ida Albanese. There I heard for the first time about developmental biology’s questions and approaches. Ida’s lectures often had a historical perspective, blending the experimental elegance of classical embryology with the latest molecular and biophysical characterisation of embryonic events. I was hooked, simply amazed by the progression of intertwined processes through which diversity and complexity are generated from a single fertilised egg.

At the end of the course Ida told us about Alberto Monroy, after whom our department was named. Monroy had a key role in shaping the field of developmental biology in southern Italy, having spent his career between Palermo, the Stazione Zoologica in Naples and the MBL. There he used to go every summer to conduct research and interact with the students. To honour him, the University and some private donors had established the A. Monroy Fellowship, which once a year funds the participation of an Italian student to the prestigious Embryology course. I googled it to see what the course was about. I said to myself, one day I’d like to be part of this.

Four years later I had completed my masters degree and joined Jacqueline Tabler‘s lab for my PhD. That moment, the beginning of a new challenging project, would have been perfect to take the course. With the support of my supervisor, I applied. I was performing my first experiments in the lab when I got the results. I felt extremely happy to accept the scholarship and prepare for a summer in Woods Hole, looking forward to making it part of my story as well.

Expectation vs reality

When I first visited the Embryology course website, I was struck by some sentences on the application form.

We would like to emphasize to applicants that MBL discovery courses are extremely rigorous […] There is little time for much else but course work. 

I wondered what a samurai training course for developmental biologists looked like, and feared that would have been exhausting. Such fear was unfounded.

The first day of the course started with an introduction by the course directors, Dave Sherwood and Rich Schneider. They then suggested to start getting to know each other with a game. In front of the posters that we brought, each one of us had to talk about his own research to another student in the course. Afterwards, all back in the same break room, students would tell the entire class about the research of their fellow. Everybody’s enthusiasm for science filled the room in a way I had never witnessed before: we were all sharing what we truly loved about our projects.

That was only the beginning of a six-weeks journey of scientific discovery, creativity and fun. We would learn about a new field and organism everyday by some of the world experts on those topics. We would then have intense but informal Q&A sessions with them, during which you had to ask something and could ask anything.

Lab work was on in the afternoon. At the microscope, injecting and dissecting embryos, running reactions or just observing faculty and TAs performing their favourite experiments. We would be taught how to craft pipettes out of glass capillaries, in order to graft a tiny piece of tissue from an embryo to another. At a certain point of the night we would stop, as Paul Trainor put his forceps back into the drawer and started making amazing cocktails for us. Having fun in and out of the lab, trying new and crazy experiments, some of us even got authorship in a paper. That’s Woods Hole.

Past, present and future of developmental biology

Many say that taking the Embryology course changes the life of its students. In fact, right there some people found the research question or organism they would later base their career on. Others ended up meeting their future postdoc advisor among the faculty. I’ve also read of students who got rid of their fears thanks to the experiences made at Embryology.

Personally, I think taking the Embryology course really changes your life, but in a more subtle way. For one summer, one hundred people with a deep interest in developmental biology meet up. All at different stages of their career, they represent the past, the present and the future of developmental biology. So many diverse expertises, experiences and personalities converge to that lab and those lecture rooms. Even if many of us work in different fields or in different parts of the globe, I’m sure the connections that we established will last long. I’m excited and curious to see the many unexpected paths they will put us on.

You don’t take the Embryology course just to learn, you become part of a community of scientists in love with development. So, like Andres, I’ll make sure not to wear off my embryology t-shirt too much. And like Dominique, I’ll be looking out for people wearing those t-shirts with embryos on the front and embryologists on the back.

(more…)

(5 votes)

Loading...

The Institute of Biology of the École Normale Supérieure (IBENS) is seeking to recruit group leaders in Developmental Biology and Neuroscience.

IBENS develops advanced and original studies aiming at discovering basic mechanisms and principles that underlie biological processes. Located in the heart of Paris, IBENS hosts 28 research teams organized into four main research axes: Developmental Biology, Neuroscience, Functional Genomics and Ecology & Evolution.

The Developmental Biology section will recruit one or two group leaders at junior and/or senior levels. The Neuroscience section seeks one junior group leader. We are looking for outstanding candidates developing ambitious research programs with the potential to interact with and complement the existing strengths of IBENS.

A poster with full details of the announcement can be found here

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS: March 1^st 2019

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

A 3-year postdoctoral position is available at the UCL Ear Institute (London, UK). This cell biology project will study the role of protein trafficking in cell polarity, cilium function and cytoskeletal organisation in the inner ear.

The postdoc will use imaging (super-resolution confocal, time-lapse microscopy, electron microscopy), molecular and biochemical techniques. They will work independently under the guidance of Dan Jagger (@AuditoryNerves), Nico Daudet (@daudet_n) and Andrew Forge. The project involves a collaboration with Mireille Montcouquiol (@PlanarPolarityT;  Bordeaux, France).

For examples of our recent work see: www.ucl.ac.uk/ear/research/jaggerlab; www.ucl.ac.uk/ear/research/daudet-lab

Applications by 28th February 2019: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BPR784/research-fellow

Informal enquiries are encouraged (email within application link).

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading...

I had heard legendary stories about the MBL and the Embryology course in the months leading up to it. Stories about the collaborations of minds that wouldn’t normally meet in the same lab, discoveries that could only have occurred at the MBL, it’s what made me apply. But once I was accepted the nervousness kicked in. The other ubiquitous tales are of the incredibly long days and equally long nights in the lab. I’m not a night owl, I’m an eight-hours-a-night sleeper and I was convinced I would be the first and go to bed every night. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with my classmates-valid, reasonable concerns I initially thought.

Boy was I wrong.

The atmosphere at the Embryology course is electric. I felt like I was buzzing for six weeks straight and didn’t want to, almost couldn’t, leave the lab. To be surrounded by incredible classmates that get just as excited about the idea of an impossible experiment as me, egged on by brilliant, hilarious and endlessly supportive faculty every night? Why would you go to bed?

I remember a night when I absolutely HAD to image primitive streak ingression in the chick embryo with mosaic labelled cells. Andrea Streit and Claudio Stern sat with me and coached me through flipping a paper-thin stage-three chick embryo and poking it delicately with a dye loaded needle before imaging it for 16 hours. I can’t describe how excited I was waking up at 8am to turn off the microscope before lecture. Only to miss breakfast because I was watching my movie over and over again as I watched labelled cells stream into the embryo. It’s also when I realized how amazing my classmates were. That morning, I walked bleary eyed into lecture and was promptly handed a bagel and a steaming cup of coffee.

I learned to trust my hands during the Embryology course. I had never dissected anything before and I found that I love it. I dissected anything I could get my hands on throughout the summer, culminating in a few of us dissecting ovaries out of every arthropod species we had on hand. We imaged structures that had only been described in the early parts of the 20^th century.

It’s also where I learned to be fearless. The lack of adverse consequences and the adventurous atmosphere meant that I got sea urchin embryos drunk to see how it affected their skeleton, I transplanted cells into zebrafish embryos and I tried to image tardigrade gastrulation. We used Walmart items and state-of-the-art microscopes in the same experiments! I can confidently say that 75% of everything I tried failed, but that was part of the fun. Our class motto ended up being along of the lines of “in DAPI we trust”.

The course tested my intellectual endurance like nothing has before. There is NO pressure to produce or perform, no judgement, no deadlines. You have to find your own drive to learn and try and fail and try and fail and sometimes succeed. Thankfully, its not hard to find that drive. At least six lectures a week from the best minds in the field, who then join you in lab and encourage you to answer impossible unanswered questions. Faculty that are just as willing to give you moral support at the microscope as they are to come have a drink with you at the local pub. Faculty that agree to an hour-long “sweatbox” Q&A session after a two hour talk so we can pepper them with every question under the sun. How can you resist?

Every time it got too hard or too overwhelming, there was always someone to get pie with at Pie in the Sky, always someone willing to take a quick dip into the ocean and always someone willing to “hunt for lightning bug embryos” on a walk by the ocean. The science makes the Embryology course amazing and enriching, the people make it incredible and special. Last summer I learned what I wanted to do and be as a scientist but I also made friends for life #embryology2018.

(2 votes)

Loading...