Small historic background:

In an era when caspases are known as killer proteins, Drosophila Malpighian tubules state otherwise. Drosophila is a holometabolous insect, meaning that it goes through three life stages: larval, pupal and adult. The pupal stage of insect development is when the major transformation occurs. Most of the larval tissues get histolysed, while adult tissues are reformed from imaginal discs that remain quiescent and isolated during the larval stage. Surprisingly, during metamorphosis, some larval tissues, such as Malpighian tubules (MTs), tracheal tubes, ventral nerve cord and some larval muscles, skip the histolysis process. However, why these tissues escape histolysis during metamorphosis has remained a question for more than a century. On the other hand, Caspases have been well established as killer proteins since their discovery; in Drosophila Caspases often compliment programmed cell death (PCD) during the histolysis. They were considered primarily as executioners of cell death until the early 2000s, when evidence began to accumulate that caspase functions extend well beyond cell death, including roles in development and tissue morphogenesis. What if caspases do much more than just kill cells?

The question asked?

While working on Drosophila melanogaster, my supervisor, Prof. Madhu G. Tapadia, wondered why insect kidneys (Malpighian tubules) escape histolysis during metamorphosis. What is so special about the Malpighian tubules in insects?

And the story began…

The story began with this very simple question, which was then taken up by two of her PhD students in 2011. Both of them started working on the expression and localization of caspases in the Malpighian tubules that is essentially reuired for the PCD. They established a landmark finding that eventually led me to my current work. Both of them reported that caspases are expressed in the cells of Malpighian tubules. However, their exact role and why MTs do not undergo histolysis during metamorphosis remained unanswered. One of them suggested that apoptotic proteins are translated in the Malpighian tubules; however, they are sequestered in their pro-apoptotic form within the nucleus and therefore coldn’t execute the cell death. Other one went one step further and reported a possible role of apoptotic proteins (reaper, hid and grim; often referred to as RHG proteins) in tissue morphogenesis and polarity maintenance.

The candidate protein Rho1GTPase!

Next came another of my senior, who carried this question through her PhD journey at Prof. Tapadia’s lab, Department of Zoology, Banaras Hindu University. She took the lead from previous studies and started examining the morphology and physiology of the Drosophila renal tubules. She discovered that executioner caspase-3/Drice (in Drosophila) is activated in both larval and pupal MTs, yet they still escape histolysis. She reported that Caspase-3 deletion mutants (Drice mutants) show cystic MTs containing multiple cyst-like structures. Additionally, cytoskeletal and polarity proteins are highly disorganized, tubules are shorter, and cell number and cell shape are affected, along with a significant reduction in tubular secretion by the Drosophila kidneys in the Drice mutants. She also identified Rho1GTPase as a key candidate protein and a master regulator of actin dynamics and polarity establishment. Rho1GTPase was significantly upregulated at the protein level in the MTs of Drice mutants, suggesting a negative correlation between Drice and Rho1.

That’s where I came in the picture…..

Finally, I joined the lab back in 2021. Since, Caspases are essentially required during metamorphosis, however, in case of Drosophila MTs, caspase-3 activity was present yet they escapes histolysis completely. Therefore, the core question had evolved significantly from how MTs evade histolysis to what role caspase-3/Drice performs in the MTs, if not cell death. I began my work with this very question. By then, it was already established that Drice is essentially required for normal tubular architecture and physiology; I also had a candidate protein to work with, viz., Rho1GTPase.

Instead of jumping directly to Rho1, I decided to look at the RhoGTPase family. In order to do so I planned to check protein expression as well as transcript levels of many targets. I examined the transcript levels of more than 20 genes for this study.

Trouble with RT-PCR….

During my RT-PCR era, my lab once received a faulty batch of SYBR Green. I was so unlucky that I got to work with that faulty batch totally unaware of what was coming. Initially, I thought the problem was with me because there was too much variation in the results. I tried again and again. At one point, my colleagues started doubting my experimental capabilities, but I couldn’t accept that and kept doing it again and again refusing to give up. I even recalibrated the machine, but the problem remained, and finally, after countless PCRs, I almost gave up. Then came the idea of trying an alternative SYBR Green, and that’s when the problem was discovered that SYBR was the actual problem. Later, even the manufacturer accepted that the batch was faulty. Anyway, it cost me around 3–4 months and a great deal of frustration. But I learned one thing from the experience: if you are doing it correctly, you will eventually get it done.

CDC42 is also affected by Caspase-3 absence along with Rho1 in the MTs….

Since Rho1 was already known to be involved, I next examined the other RhoGTPases, Rac and CDC42. I found that CDC42 was also dysregulated in the MTs of Drice mutants, whereas Rac remained unaffected. This made me wonder: how were Rho1 and CDC42 affecting the actin cytoskeleton, the internal framework of the cells?

I first followed the Rho1 pathway and found something unexpected: Rok, a downstream effector of Rho1, was significantly reduced despite high levels of Rho1 in Drice mutants. When I knocked down Rok, the MTs developed defects similar to those of the Drice mutants, including disorganized actin and polarity proteins. This suggested that reduced Rok could contribute to the tubule defects.

I then turned to CDC42. CDC42 and its downstream effectors were increased, and CDC42 is known to promote actin thickening through the Arp2/3 complex. Interestingly, I observed similar actin thickening in Drice mutant MTs. To test this idea, I reduced Arp2 and Arp3 in Drice mutants, which restored the excessive actin thickening. Together, these findings pointed to Rok and Arp2/3 as two important downstream components through which Drice influences actin organization.

Actin polymerization vs depolymerization!

Now the next problem was densely packed actin: what was actually happening? Was actin being hyper-polymerized or depolymerized in the MTs? The best way to answer this was to look at the levels of F-actin and G-actin separately. Very high G-actin and low F-actin would suggest depolymerization, while the reverse would indicate actin polymerization. Following this, I found that in Drice mutants, F-actin was significantly higher and G-actin was very low compared with the wild-type MTs. We therefore hypothesized that actin was undergoing hyper-polymerization in the MTs of Drice mutants, and we moved ahead with this hypothesis.

But until now one major question remained: how was Caspase-3/Drice controlling these in the first place? That was the next question I had to answer.

What exactly Caspase-3 is doing in the MTs?

Until now, we had made significant progress. We knew that the morphological defects in the MTs were most likely due to Rok dysfunction and Arp2/3 overexpression. However, one crucial question remained: How was Caspase-3/Drice regulating actin dynamics in the MTs? Was Caspase-3 interacting with Rho1? If so, was this interaction direct, or was it mediated indirectly through some modulator?

Three months of frustration….

To address this crucial question, I initially targeted a few candidate proteins and started checking whether they had any effect on actin expression and organization in the MTs. Growing flies, dissecting MTs and performing immunostaining for multiple targets was not an easy task. Also, once the immunostaining was done, there was still slide scanning, figure panel preparation and image analysis—oh gosh! I wish it were as easy as I have written it here. Target after target! I could not make significant progress and kept changing the target proteins. There was a time during this period when I seriously hated the lab and my work. The solution to this problem was actually very simple: a new technique that I learned quickly.

My saviour: immunoprecipitation – the answer was finally found.

After realizing that one-by-one targeting was never going to solve my problem, I performed immunoprecipitation (IP) to check the protein–protein interaction partners of Rho1. Guess what? Out of 75 proteins, there was only one that linked Rho1, Actin and Caspase-3 together—and that was Gelsolin, the protein I had been looking for all along. IP suggested an interaction between Rho1 and Gelsolin in wild-type MTs, which was absent in the Drice mutants. Gelsolin also showed Caspase-3-mediated regulation of actin dynamics. I further confirmed this finding to be fully assured that it was reproducible, and I obtained similar results repeatedly. That was when I became convinced that we had finally found the missing link.

Gelsolin contributes to actin filament turnover and severing and thereby helps regulate the F-actin pool. Therefore, the absence of Gelsolin provides a possible explanation for the elevated F-actin levels and altered actin dynamics in the MTs. I finally had my answer, and we could finally move on to the publication part.

Paper communication: make or break point of the story!

Scientific publication always feels heavier and harder than the research itself. Also, by this stage, my supervisor was more convinced of my work, and I was also satisfied with what we had achieved. She encouraged me to send the work to prestigious journals, and I did so. After being rejected by two journals, the manuscript finally landed in Cell Death & Discovery, where they agreed to send it for revision.

Reviewer’s comments: Is it going to be accepted?

This work was reviewed by three reviewers in total. The first two agreed to review the manuscript within a week, while the third one took his time. After waiting for almost three weeks, the first wave of reviews finally arrived in my mailbox. I was anxious about what the reviewers would say. After reading the first reviewer’s comments, I was completely frozen. The first reviewer had rejected my work outright, mostly because I had not cited a particular paper and he did not seem convinced by the work. My anxiety levels were beyond words. Then came the second reviewer. What was it going to be? The second reviewer was very optimistic and seemed to like the concept I had presented in the manuscript. He asked several questions, which I was happy to answer. I had already anticipated three or four of those questions and had performed the experiments in the background, and when the second reviewer asked two of them, my morale was significantly boosted.

Finally, after another two weeks of waiting, the comments from the third reviewer arrived. He really liked the work and suggested only minor revisions. The third reviewer summarized my manuscript so well that I even added a few of his lines to the Discussion section of the paper. And finally, with the publication of the paper, the story came to a happy ending.

What I learned during this journey:

Looking back, this journey taught me that science is rarely a straight path. There were times when I questioned my experiments, my approach and even myself. But every failed experiment, every unexpected result and every setback pushed me a little closer to the answer. The faulty SYBR Green taught me not to blame myself too quickly; the failed candidate-protein approach taught me to change my strategy; and Gelsolin taught me that sometimes the answer is hiding among the possibilities you have not yet considered.

Most importantly, I learned that if you believe in the question, stay honest with your data and keep looking for the answer, you will eventually get there. So, the take-home message is:

Ask good questions.
Believe in yourself when things go wrong.
Change your strategy when the evidence tells you to.
And never mistake a setback for the end of the story.

Bioinformatics can seem intimidating, especially when you’re just starting out. But you don’t need to be an expert to begin exploring single-cell RNA-seq data. In this short tutorial, I walk through a simple four-step workflow using a publicly available dataset from the developing zebrafish heart: get the data, prepare it, visualize the cells, and ask a biological question.

What is this?

This is a beginner-friendly introduction to exploring single-cell RNA-seq data using publicly available datasets.

Where can this be found?

The tutorial uses a publicly available dataset from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO): GSE296176, Single-cell transcriptomic profiling of the developing zebrafish heart.

How was this made?

Using R and Seurat, we go through four simple steps: getting the data, preparing it, visualizing the cells, and asking a biological question.

Why should people care about this?

Single-cell RNA-seq is transforming the way we study biology. Today, this technology is widely used in research on development, cancer, aging, regeneration and disease, helping researchers understand what is happening at the level of individual cells. By revealing differences that can be hidden when we look at an entire tissue, single-cell transcriptomics is becoming an increasingly important tool for understanding both how healthy tissues develop and how they change in disease.

How would you explain this to an 8-year-old?

Imagine you have a big box of LEGO pieces, but you don’t know which pieces are there. Single-cell analysis helps you sort the pieces into groups and figure out what each one might be used to build.

Where can people find more about it?

The step-by-step PDF tutorial and the complete R script used in the video are available on GitHub: https://github.com/onishiibe/single-cell-tutorial/tree/main

The International Symposium on Root Development (often referred to as the “Rooting” conference series) takes place every three years and unites developmental biology, agriculture, plant-pathogen interactions, and biotechnology – on plant roots! 

After it had taken place in a monastery in Ghent in 2023, this year’s conference was held at the Riva Marina Resort in Specchiolla on the Adriatic coast of Southern Italy, organised by Sabrina Sabatini (University of Rome), Raffaele Dello Ioio (University of Rome) and Riccardo Di Mambro (University of Pisa). 

Of course, the conference also provided a wonderful opportunity for members of our Root Anatomy and Architecture working group of the International Society of Root Research (ISRR) (https://www.rootresearch.org/working-groups) to meet in person. Our group brings together early- and mid-career researchers from around the world, including the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark, and the Netherlands. While we usually connect online, this conference gave us the chance to finally meet face-to-face, get to know one another better, and talk science.

What do the organizers think?

The next edition of the conference (12^th International Symposium on Root Development) is planned to be held at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, organized by Ikram Blilou and colleagues. Looking forward to seeing you there!

As a university student working towards my bachelor’s degree, I didn’t even know what it would mean to add “Dr.” to my name. Six months into my postdoc, I regularly catch myself having forgotten that I have a PhD. If you spend all your life thinking you must prove yourself, then you risk becoming trapped in a perpetual grind, unable to accept your accomplishments.

In recent years, the burdens that first-generation students face in higher education and academia have received an increased amount of attention. As a first-generation academic who is very outspoken about this part of my identity, on several occasions colleagues have asked me to name the exact difficulties this has caused. This is not as easy as it might seem. The challenge frequently lies within the identification of what the actual additional hurdles are. Put simply: “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Thus, I have recently sought out resources that specifically handle this topic, which has helped the contextualization of my personal experiences and the bigger systematic challenges of first-generation students and academics.

Pursuing a university degree is not an easy feat for most people, regardless of one’s socio-economic background and parental career paths. Studying at university commonly differs from prior school experiences with higher workloads and less direct supervision and guidance. Simultaneously, someone’s time as a university student often coincides with attempting to finding answers to bigger questions: “Who am I and what do I want to do with my life?” While these challenges are shared amongst university students, they can feel particularly difficult for first-generation students. It can feel particularly disorienting when the people in one’s personal life put you up on a pedestal all the while you can’t keep up with the most basic lectures, homework assignments and exams. Other first-generation students may have people in their personal life who tell them to “just get a normal job”, as learning a trade, for example, may seem like a more secure option compared to an extended time in the education system with unclear work prospects. At the same time, your peers always seem to be a step ahead of you: They have found laboratory placements, summer internships, and applied for graduate schools before you even realized those were options. While this is by no means an all-encompassing list, these experiences stack up and lead to an overwhelming sense of “not fitting in” – in addition to those times when someone actually tells you so.

Some brave first-generation students may reach for postgraduate education, like master’s and PhD degrees, or even continue down the academic route and aim for postdoctoral and faculty positions. The barriers for first-generation students do not magically disappear when reaching for these next steps. Rather, they can become more obvious the further you go. As you climb the academic career ladder, the percentage of first-generation academics around you decreases. I found that it is especially those that seem to struggle with severe imposter syndrome, although exceptions of course do exist. This feeling of not actually deserving your position, that you were somehow just lucky, and that someone will reveal your identity as an “imposter” can lead to intense negative thoughts and feelings about yourself if not actively combatted. As a first-generation academic seeking to overcome, you may try to overcorrect by harshly submitting yourself to the “publish or perish” culture and pouring everything you have into your academic work. Nonetheless, nothing seems to be enough to satisfy the “imposter” inside your brain when the repeated exposure to these negative feelings are reinforced by the constant reminders that people like you don’t belong here. You convince yourself this is true, and it strongly overlaps with your internalization of classist world views. It is unsurprising then that someone might prefer to opt out and choose a different life eventually. Particularly when people around your age are beginning their “real adult lives”, e.g. receiving promotions, buying property, starting families, or even just manage to afford international vacations on a regular basis. It is difficult to stick it out in academia while you feel like a child stuck in school with your parents still asking when your summer break starts and everything seems to scream “you shouldn’t be here”.

Oftentimes, it is perceived as being obnoxious when someone insists on the recognition of their academic titles. Of course, my PhD doesn’t make me a better person by any means. Nonetheless, I do think that the lacking representation of first-generation academics contributed to my not wanting to attend my PhD graduation. I believe it is the reason I didn’t take the time to properly celebrate this accomplishment, and why I now have to be reminded of this achievement on a regular basis. While I have luckily only been told a handful of times that I “should leave academia to those who actually belong”, I feel that the lack of tangible role models and my own negative self-talk is what leads me to question my career choices the most – on top of the larger systemic issues pushing out or not letting in first-generation academics in the first place, of course.

While I internalize and blame myself for every failed step of an experiment, no matter how small, I simultaneously ignore all my accomplishments. Instead of being proud of myself for receiving the inaugural “Best Thesis Award” at my PhD institute, I tell myself that this could just be awarded to me out of pity because one of my PhD supervisors died. Instead of celebrating the acceptance of my second PhD paper, I am focusing on the negative genotyping results I got the same day. Instead of being proud of myself for submitting four separate postdoctoral fellowship applications within six months, I am focusing on the one single rejection (so far). Looking at these words written down, I am appalled by what is going on inside my head. And when my lab mates tell me about similar feelings, I give them a minutes-long pep talk, not letting up until they seem to have accepted their wins instead of focusing on their losses. Yet, it is much harder to combat the internalized classism and imposter syndrome that have settled in quite comfortably into my own brain.

Now, I am taking small steps to actively combat these thoughts and feelings. At the forefront of it all, I am working on appreciating my accomplishments. In addition, I have to combat the toxicity of academic hustle culture that reinforces me to tie my own self-worth to my research output. While I would never judge someone else based on their experimental outcomes, number of papers, or degrees accomplished, I tend to be quick to do so with myself. This plays into me having to start taking time for things outside of science again. Academic research certainly does not follow a typical 9-to-5-job: While days can sometimes be shorter, they can also be much longer. Importantly, I am now having to tell myself that this does not mean that every single day must be a 10-hour workday just because there is more that could be done. So, I actively remind myself and plan to pursue other interests outside of the lab, which is contributing to better mental health and re-energizes my brain. Lastly, I am seeking out resources in which other people in similar shoes talk about their experiences. Especially learning about the intersectionality of barriers within and outside of academia has helped me tremendously to understand the challenges I have faced throughout my own life. Simultaneously, I feel like there is still not enough representation of historically underrepresented minorities in science, which is why I intend to share my own experiences loudly and proudly, for example by writing and publishing this very piece! I can only hope that this will help others understand that we as first-generation students and academics do in fact belong here and that you are not the only one who struggles.  

It is summertime. I am eight years old and on summer break. I have been an early bird for as long as I can remember, and that morning I get out of bed at sunrise and run barefoot outside. I still vividly remember the smell of grass in the early morning and the chilly dew on my feet.

I am going to our garden for one specific thing: fresh cucumbers. And there they are.

I am in awe. Just the evening before, I could have sworn they weren’t there. Now the garden is full of cucumbers ready to be picked. In my eight-year-old mind, this is equivalent to magic. I don’t know anything about the processes that allowed it to happen, I only know that somehow, while I was sleeping, our garden had been busy growing. And that breakfast is going to be especially tasty.

I grew up in a rural area, where we produced much of our own fruit and vegetables. My family was in a difficult financial situation, and that made us resourceful. From an early age, my mother taught us to forage for edible and medicinal plants in the surrounding pastures, sharing knowledge she had learned from her own mother. Growing food was not just a hobby. Every seed mattered.

Perhaps that is why plants never felt like background scenery to me. They were food, medicine, and part of everyday life. But they also raised endless questions. How can something as small as a seed become an entire organism? How could it build roots, leaves and flowers, eventually, feed a family? I couldn’t name it then, but what fascinated me was plant development.

Unlike animals, plants continue making new organs throughout their lives. Hidden within their growing tips are populations of stem cells that give rise to new tissues and structures. From these small groups of cells, plants can regenerate virtually indefinitely. Rooted in one place, these organisms have evolved an astonishing ability to adjust to the everchanging world around them. The more I learned, the stranger (and more fascinating) they became.

My questions eventually took me even further back in time. I became interested not only in how plants develop, but in how these remarkable ways of growing came to exist in the first place. Today, I study the evolution of the green lineage: the ancient history that ultimately gave rise to the diversity of green organisms around us. From your unassuming lawn grass, to rose flowers, and all the way to giants such as sequoia trees. 

In some ways, I am still asking the question that began in our garden: how did we get here? From a single cell to a complex organism. From ancient green lineages to the diversity we see today. And from a seed in the soil to a cucumber that seemed to appear overnight. I know now that the cucumber’s growth was not magic. Behind it were cells dividing and expanding, tissues differentiating, and signals responding to the environment. Behind those processes lies an even older story, more than a billion years of evolutionary change. Sometimes I think back to that eight-year-old standing barefoot in the wet grass, inspecting the garden in amazement. I understand much more about the fascinating world of plants than she did.

But I am not sure it seems any less magical.

On 26 April, a sun-drenched country hotel in East Sussex set the stage for an intensive three-day workshop that brought together 30 leading metabolism researchers across cell biology, mitochondrial biology, developmental biology, cancer biology and systems biology. Organised by Lydia Finley and Wilhelm Palm, the meeting provided a forum for sharing unpublished findings, assessing the current state of the field, and exploring the next steps needed to accelerate its rapidly growing impact. This meeting aimed to reframe metabolism as an information-processing and signaling system, rather than simply a set of biochemical pathways that generate ATP and biosynthetic precursors.

The discussions made one point abundantly clear: metabolism can no longer be viewed simply as a network of reactions that build and break down macromolecules to meet cellular energy demands. Across a wide range of experimental systems and approaches, attendees presented compelling evidence that metabolism shapes cell identity, development, epigenetic regulation, homeostasis, survival, growth, disease, and intercellular communication. The shared findings showed that metabolites can act as signaling molecules, modify proteins and chromatin, influence cell fate, communicate between organelles and tissues, and alter responses to environmental stress. Rather than serving as a supporting player, metabolism is consolidating as a central organising principle of biology.

This workshop provided an extraordinary opportunity for the ten early-career researchers in attendance to discuss their own work and learn from recent findings by leaders in the field, whose work challenges and redefines traditional views of metabolism. The central topic was explored across multiple biological scales, from individual metabolites and protein modifications to whole-organism physiology.

Through the presentations and the “hot topics” discussion, it was also highlighted that the field has remarkable methodological momentum. New machine-learning approaches, large-scale databases, and innovative strategies to map metabolite–protein interactions are expanding the scope of metabolic research at an unprecedented pace. In addition, research in the field has substantially increased spatial and temporal resolution through high-resolution mass spectrometry, spatial omics, biosensors, and advanced microscopy. Far from approaching a plateau, the field continues to uncover fundamental mechanisms that govern biological systems, reinforcing its position as one of the most dynamic and influential areas of modern biology.

Beyond the science, the workshop’s relaxed setting fostered lively discussions and new connections among fellow metabolism enthusiasts from the field of cancer biology, developmental biology, mitochondrial biology, systems biology and metabolomics. Whether exchanging fresh perspectives on ongoing research, exploring the English countryside on foot, or even enjoying a round of golf, participants found plenty of opportunities to spark ideas and build collaborations. Altogether, the workshop not only highlighted how far the field has come but also underscored the exciting opportunities that lie ahead.

Liliana Piñeros is a postdoctoral researcher at the Heald lab, UC Berkeley. She is interested in investigating the cellular and molecular basis of the conserved scaling relationship between an organism’s size and its metabolic rate described by Kleiber’s law, using Xenopus frogs as an experimental model.

Diego Sainz de la Maza is a postdoctoral researcher at the Amoyel Lab, University College London. His research studies how cell metabolism regulates adult stem cell self-renewal and differentiation.

The first time I went to an SDB meeting as a new PhD student was in 2016. This year at the annual meeting in Las Vegas, I couldn’t believe that it had been 10 years since I first went. I can still remember my first meeting, I knew very little about developmental biology (having never even taken a developmental biology course), and I definitely didn’t know many people either. I just knew my mentor Robb and a few folks from Stowers. There was one familiar face from there, who I really tried to just follow and have coffee with, who I know thought, gosh, why can’t this person leave me alone? We became friends over time and now this is something we just laugh about.

As a first-timer, I was in awe of all the science that is being done and being done on all the different organisms. Even more fascinating was how people just seem to know each other. I also kept hearing “embryo such-and-such-year” and had absolutely no clue what that was. What I particularly remember from my first year though is the feeling of being welcomed into a group. Everyone seemed busy (and now I know that it is because they are catching up with friends), but if you reached out and spoke to them you could see the nice human behind the great scientist. That first meeting, I got pictures with people who write developmental biology textbooks, I got invited to a dinner and met some amazing folks. I don’t think they even remember, but they introduced me to a whole new world. I saw how passionate these developmental biologists were, how much history and depth this field had, and I saw how happy everyone was in just being at the meeting.

Since then, the venue of the conference has constantly changed, and I have liked some places more than others, but the joy of being a part of this Society for Developmental Biology has never faded. I have over the years, on instances felt more people can be included for giving talks because, honestly, sometimes it has felt like the same folks are giving talks every time. This SDB meeting though, I was particularly excited to see the variety in the different types of talks and in the great number of different labs that were represented. Also, to me personally, it is usually amazing watching trajectories for how some organisms become great research systems and in hearing career stories about different scientific paths, especially through award lectures. This year, it was especially delightful listening to the presidential and award lecture talks, each one having you hooked and wanting to know more. My new favorite plant now is the flowering Arabidopsis in a little eppendorf tube. I also got to learn about a new species, work on which started when the pandemic shutdown hit, showing me signs of both scientific resilience and human curiosity at its finest.

I heard a lot of short talks. Some from established scientists with their beautiful stories that motivate me to get to that point someday. Some talks from trainees, and I could see the proud mentors, mentors who just a few years ago were giving their own faculty talks as they went on the job market. Throughout the meeting, I was inspired by the art and science merger in so many different forms; the art show with its variety of pieces, the collection of organism chips (and the subsequent drawing on your own chip), and even in the the becoming of art yourself (the sheer living ephemeral beauty of such a venture). I saw graduate students shyly reaching out to people for potential future postdocs (I would encourage trainees to reach out to people during or before even to show your poster. I saw postdocs networking as they begin job searches. I witnessed the happy adventure story sharing of everyone who has been to the MBL (Marine Biological laboratory). This for folks who don’t know is also where the echo of “embryo” comes from, which year you took the embryology course is you being embryo of that year. Having been at MBL for a year and getting to meeting so many friends was already special, but I got to capture everyone present at the gathering through the vantage point of a spiral staircase. I also captured, through my camera lens, the SDB presidents past, present, and future, and got to interact with such a neat group of people that brings the community such a beautiful meeting and continues to bring such amazing resources for trainees at all levels. I have seen, and also through firsthand experience gained from, the many neat programs the society brings to the community. At the annual SDB meeting, all the cohorts from these different programs get to have get-togethers and experience the joy of being in one space, in the happy bubble of development et al. There are the little ones who are just starting out (Choose Development Fellows), the postdocs needing to venture on their own (GetHired), the new faculty trying not get lost (New Faculty Bootcamp), and all the folks who want to learn from experts on making scientific exchange accessible to more (Science communication internship).

Being in Robb’s lab introduced me to this fascinating world of developmental biology and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The SDB meeting over the years has taught me so much as I continue this journey. I have attended a session with expert panelists talking about publishing, seen theatrical enactments of current issues in the field, and also had a chance once to give a chalk talk after doing the GetHired program. I still have the encouraging post-it notes from that time, and watching others give their chalk talks was something I really missed this year. Then there is the beauty that tops it all, in all the amazing science that one gets to hear. I tell myself every year that I will just sit in one session and listen to all the talks there. In an ideal world I’d like to listen to all the talks, but that clearly doesn’t happen. The night before, as I look through the schedule, I always realize there are some “I must attend” talks, some “I really would like to attend” talks, and some “ahh if there were three of me, I would just go to each concurrent session” talks. This conundrum, then inadvertently has me always bouncing between sessions, and as I migrate from session to session, I see that I am not alone. A lot of us become geeky birds flocking to one neat session after another, rushing to make sure we don’t miss a talk, jotting notes and questions, scanning the schedule to make sure we have the correct room for the next one, and smiling in the hallways as we pass or follow each other.

This year was special for me in multiple ways, but particularly in two ways. One was my eye lens watching the scientific beauty on screen, listening, learning new concepts and advancements in science, and jotting down all my questions. Some that I got to ask, and some that I think I might just email to ask. The other personal joy in the meeting was through another lens – my camera lens which had me pausing to appreciate the buzz going on around me. I went around taking pictures of friends, previous years it has been with selfies and this year it was through capturing some friendships in time. At some points, I felt I was being paparazzi to some science gurus. Some other of my lens captures were the little exchanges of “I loved your talk and I have a question”, of snapping the different physical memoirs of model organism that people showcased through t-shirts, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, bag tags, etc, and then some captures were of the adorable “this is my first time and I am camera shy” or “let me grab a friend” and then we are game for a picture. For all who allowed my camera lens, I wanted to say that it was an honor to see and be a part of your beautiful smiles and scientific exchanges.

Taking pictures at the meeting taught me that I am maybe sometimes a little impatient (sorry if anyone felt annoyed at my picture-taking interruption), that I can be very quick at capturing and recognizing moments (hoping this also translates into my science lab adventures), and that there is just so much beauty in how we scientifically inclined humans interact. We continue to nurture, share, and guide each other, and I really hope that this always stays at the core of the community that SDB has built. I am so thankful to Richard and Marsha for allowing me this opportunity to be the official photographer at the meeting, and so thankful to all the many folks for the coffee, lunch, and dinner happy times during the meeting. You all made my meeting a constant happy buzz that my brain enjoyed and will gleefully remember. The bright flashing lights of Vegas definitely are pale in comparison to the bright happy exchanges I had with you all at the meeting. I got to enjoy the meeting through two lenses this year and it couldn’t have become more special.
Thank you thank you!!

Signed
Developing developmental biologist
and SDB 2026’s official photographer

To browse through some of the meeting fun, here are some pictures: SDB 2026 pictures

How Parhyale hawaiensis went from mundane beach critter to lab celebrity across biology, chemistry and even physics. 

Pop down to the beach, pick up a handful of seaweed and you’re likely to be greeted by dozens of little crustaceans exploding out from underneath, frantically trying hop away for the nearest bit of cover. You probably never gave them much attention because you were busy hunting for crabs or just hoping to fling some seaweed at a sibling. And that’s completely fair as they’re far from the most attractive critters on the shore. 

But if you’d looked a little closer, you’d find that those little crustaceans were beach hoppers, also know as sand fleas, which, let’s be honest, doesn’t help win them any additional popularity. These beach hoppers are a group of crustaceans we call amphipods. And one in particular, Parhyale hawaiensis, inadvertently became a bit of a biology celeb. 

Coming in at under 2 cm, Parhyale lives in intertidal rubble and rotting leaf litter around warm coastlines. For those who decided to keep these little critters, it became apparent they breed every two or three weeks, all year-round, from the comfort of standard plastic tray filled with artificial seawater. Oh and they’ll happily eat a slice of carrot. 

Rather mundane to warrant the title ‘celeb’, you might say, but its academic CV is nonetheless impressive. Over twenty-five years this animal has turned up in developmental biology, evolutionary theory, regeneration research, soft-matter physics, neuroanatomy, the study of biological clocks, immunology, pollution monitoring, biofuel enzymology and aquaculture. So, not too shabby for something you’d shake out of your beach towel without a second thought. Without any more rambling from me, here’s how that all happened. 

It began with an egg

Not a transparent one, as you might expect of an animal we chose specifically for watching. The Parhyale egg is about half a millimetre wide and looks like a dense ball of white(ish) yolk, which you can’t see into it at all. What you can see is the surface, where a bunch of large cells sit, each identifiable by position, and all visible through under an ordinary microscope. So far so good. 

In 2002 researchers dyed the cells of the egg, which we’ll correctly call and embryo from here on out, at a point when the whole thing was made of just eight cells. Four smaller ones on top, and four larger ones beneath. These eight cells of the very early embryo were followed, with studious researchers carefully mapping out where each one ended up, and found the whole future animal was already neatly parcelled out between them (1): three would build skin and nervous system, three the muscle and other internal tissues, one the gut lining, and one the germ line (the cells that make things like gametes for reproduction). These identities, or fates, were settled before there’s anything you’d call an animal. Locking in fates itself was interesting because this tends to happen much later in most other animals. Importantly, it opened the door for lots of intriguing questions around how these predestined cells related to each other. 

The obvious step was to see what happens if we removed one of those early cells. Do neighbours pick up the slack and chip in to build our little beach hopper, or is it destined to be without a particular type of tissues, such as muscle, and end up distinctly more beach ‘crawler’ than hopper? Well, it tuns out if you remove one of the three internal-tissue founders, the neighbours do indeed cover for it, but nothing crosses between lineages (2), i.e. a muscle precursor removed meant only muscle neighbours helped compensate. Lose the germ-line founder and the embryo carries on building itself, but reaches the end of embryogenesis with no germ cells to be found, and nothing else steps in to supply them (3), and they still hatch! (4)

Surprisingly, if you strip out the little patch of cell goop (officially called the cytoplasm) that carries the germ-line instructions in the one-cell embryo, you get no germ cells as expected, but the embryo also never makes it as far as an early but important stage of development called gastrulation (the point at which the ball of cells starts folding itself into something with an inside and an outside). Those two points turn out to be unrelated, because an embryo that loses its germ-line cell three divisions later, at the eight-cell stage, gastrulates perfectly happily (5). This suggests the germ plasm is doing something quite separate from just specifying germ cells, which is cool and intriguing. What’s super weird is that the Patel lab reports, though not yet in print, that some animals go on to rebuild a germ line from non-germ line tissue and reach maturity fully fertile. “Nature, erm, finds a way.”

Sorting all this out required tools, and a shared staging system was the logical starting point (1). Transgenics and then CRISPR leapt in to answer more detailed questions (6), and then then a genome of roughly 3.6 billion letters, which is a little bigger than ours, came along to help link things together (7). Each new step was developed to answer another question about development and each new step handed the animal and knowledge to someone else.

Where insect wings came from

As a crustacean, Parhyale isn’t an insect (obviously), but it is an arthropod and you’d be forgiven for noting the similarities. Like insects, crustaceans have an impressive array of appendages; they come usually come equipped claws, gills, paddles, walking legs, jumping legs and mouthparts, all of which form from the same repeating segments. And once the genes that assign those jobs (the Hox genes) had been mapped (8) they could be switched off one at a time. With some clever molecular work, you can show all this with experiments where you get walking legs where an abdomen should be, or missing gills or an animal that gives up on specialisation altogether and builds the same generic limb over and over.

But back to insects and an argument running since the nineteenth century about where insect wings came from: a fresh outgrowth on the back, or a bit of ancestral leg carried upward as the body wall swallowed the leg’s base? Unanswerable in insects, who absorbed the relevant leg segments long ago and conveniently destroyed the evidence.

But Parhyale never absorbed them. In 2020 two groups attacked this from opposite ends and published back to back (9, 10). One knocked out leg-patterning genes and compared the wreckage to insects, while the other went looking for the genetic signature of a wing in crustacean tissue. They came to different conclusions about the route (one that the wing descends from an outgrowth on that ancestral leg segment, the other that it is a merger of two tissues, back and leg) but they agree an insect’s flank corresponds to a crustacean’s topmost leg segment, and that the wing is built partly from what used to be leg. Later work chased the same ancient tissue across to a very distant crustacean cousin, where it turns up as the shell of the water flea (11).

Neither settled it and the argument grinds on, with Paleozoic fossils now thrown in. But a question fought over for a century mostly by staring at insects, who had destroyed the evidence, finally had an animal you could do genetics in.

Legs that come back

We all like legs. They’re great for getting to and from places, I always find. Losing one is therefore somewhat of a bother. Unless you happen to be our favourite beach hopper of course, in which case if you lose a leg, you can regrow it in about a week (12). We know this because the limb’s shell is stiff and clear, so you can glue it to a microscope coverslip and film the whole thing in an awake animal, using the exoskeleton as splint and window at once (13). Turns out the new tissue comes from cells already committed to a fate rather than some reserve of blank ones, so, muscle from muscle lineages, skin from skin. And the muscle is rebuilt by satellite-like cells, which are a back-up group of cells lying dormant, wedged between the muscle fibre and its surrounding membrane, until there’s some damage. Up until this work, satellite cells had only ever been found in chordates, and if they really are the same cell type, the machinery was already there in the common ancestor of pretty much every animal with a front and a back! The skin, however, isn’t lucky enough to have these standby cells, and instead ordinary cells near the cut just divide, work out where they now are, and get on with it.

Compare what an embryo does when building a leg with what an adult does regrowing one and the two schedules simply refuse to line up (14). Yet when you take a look at the regrown leg properly, its sensory hairs, whether they work, what cell types it contains, and you’d never be able tell it from one that was never cut off, other than being a little on the small size (15).

Squares

Cells in a sheet normally pack into hexagons, or close enough, like bubbles or honeycomb. Parhyale embryos use tidy rows of squares (16), and since rows of those squares become the segments of the adult, this is likely more than just for show and could be tied to cell identifies and the movements needed for development. But right now it’s a bit of an open question. It does however form a nice bridge between a biology problem and a physics one, because dividing cells should really mess up any tidy arrangement. Filming whole embryos, however, showed it’s the divisions themselves keeping things tidy: waves of oriented division sweep through, and faults get swept out to the edge (17, 18), maintaining a tidy, ‘global’ pattern across the embryo. And so now, Parhyale has a whole new audience in physics journals, which nobody planned.

A brain and some rubbish eyes

You probably don’t immediately think of a brain when you think of tiny crustaceans, hopping around the beach. But it’s there, in a way, mostly in the form of a concentrated nervous system and that nervous system went undescribed for a slightly awkwardly long time (especially in considering how much attention invertebrate neurobiology has had over the year!). Thankfully, it eventually got the recognition it deserved, and it now has a proper brain atlas (19) and even some rather splendid maps of its signalling molecules (20). The eyes are cool part, each with about fifty facets, five light-sensitive cells apiece rather than the usual eight, wired into the brain differently from related animals (21). Okay, that’s the cool part, but the reality is they’re a little bit rubbish: fine for working out roughly where you are, but not for seeing anything. But hey, it’s good to know and have genetic access to understand them, especially since nearly everything we know about arthropod eyes comes from one fly.

Two clocks

I keep an eye on the tides because they’re going to influence whether I can escape my office and get out for a surf. I imagine if was tiny beach hopper, living between the tidemarks, I probably keep a closer eye on them since whether I ate or starved, lived or died, may depended on it. But tide times move, so you need to track the tides as well as the day, and tides run on a 12.4-hour cycle that drifts against the 24-hour one. Everyone knew intertidal animals anticipate tides, but nobody could find the machinery, because there simply weren’t tidal animal that could be genetically manipulated to poke around for answers.

Parhyale to the rescue. It’s a tenacious little swimmer and can swim in impressive 12.4-hour bursts that persist without tides; you can train them to swim to ‘fake’ tides in the lab and they keep to their hardcore timed swimming sessions even when temperatures shift. With some genetic jiggery pokery, you find that if you knock out a gene called, Bmal1, you knock out the ordinary daily clock (the circadian one) and their sense of tidal rhythm (the circatidal one), too. This is first hard evidence the two clocks share parts (22). Later work also found separate clusters of clock cells in the brain, some following light, others sticking to the tides regardless (23), and very recent research suggest the remaining clock genes matter for both rhythms (24). If you give the animals irregular tides, some abandon tidal time for daylight altogether, which may be how one species colonised coastlines with wildly different tides.

Everything else, quickly

It doesn’t even stop there! But since I’m sure you have more to do with your day than read a mini-thesis about beach fleas, I’m going to whizz through some of additional, but not less important, topics since they cover an impressive range of subjects!

Pollution

Tropical marine ecotoxicology has always badly needed a standard test model organism since most protocols were built for temperate species. A Brazilian group supplied one in 2017 in the form of, you guess it, Parhyale hawaiensis, complete with a ‘how to look after your very own beach hopper In the lab’ guide and a short toxicity test in 96-well plates (25). Since then, the ecotox world has cottoned on to how useful Parhyale might be and now we have DNA damage assays, reproduction and growth protocols to look at chronic toxicity (26), the finding that males and females respond to the same contaminants differently and evidence that hydrocarbons and microplastics wreck feeding, mating and moulting well below lethal doses (27). Some studies now use limb regeneration itself as the readout.

Immunity

Parhyale’s blood cells were finally described in 2023 and the come in three types, all of which will happily eat E. coli in a dish (28). Since farmed prawns and shrimp are close relatives with worsening disease problems, an immune system we can actually study in detail is worth having. Proof that no research ever evades immunology forever!

Wood

Bet you didn’t expect to see anything about wood in a marine crustacean article? Well, weirdly, the Parhyale genome carries a full set of enzymes for breaking down plant fibre, as do those of related crustaceans (7). I don’t think they’ll be any competition for beavers – no one’s watched one digest a log… yet – but what the data turned up was the genetic capacity in a group where wood-eating was thought to be a ‘niche speciality’, shall we say.

Heat

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s been rather hot of late, so having more ways to understand how heat affects marine life is always going to be important. Folk have now grown Parhyale at 20, 23, 26 and 29^oC to work out what suits them, albeit mostly with an eye on aquaculture (29). Growth peaks when warm, survival peaks when slightly cooler and once you dip below about 26^oC they take so long to breed that a generation didn’t finish inside the study. It’s worth pointing out that this is aquaculture data, not climate data, but a hardy tropical intertidal animal with a genome, a brain atlas, a whole molecular toolkit and a known thermal preference is an obvious candidate for asking what warming seas do to the things living in them. That work is mostly still to come.

What actually did it for Parhyale?

It’s tempting to say the animal is special but, in the grand scheme of things, it’s really not. Amphipods are among the most species-rich groups in Crustacea and most are much of a muchness. As for suitability in the lab, that happened by accident, truth be told; just researchers happening to stumble across them doing very well in an aquarium. So rather than uniqueness, the thing that did it for Parhyale really comes down to legibility: you have a few dozen big cells on the outside of a yolk ball, each one east to spot, each one nameable and each one watchable for days, and that was a very useful position to start from.

And from there, every piece of the toolkit turned out to be good for something other than its original purpose. Reporter lines built to trace lineages were what was needed to light up photoreceptors, long-term filming built for embryology was what a physicist needed, gene editing built to test how segments get their identity was what a chronobiologist needed to break a clock. Each new tool, each new piece of understanding, passed to the next scientist asking a new question. And none of the answers were visible from the beach, where there’s just a small, rather boring-looking crustacean under a pile of old seaweed, keeping time with the tides.

References

1. M. Gerberding, W. E. Browne, N. H. Patel, Cell lineage analysis of the amphipod crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis reveals an early restriction of cell fates. Development 129, 5789–5801 (2002).

2. A. L. Price, M. S. Modrell, R. L. Hannibal, N. H. Patel, Mesoderm and ectoderm lineages in the crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis display intra-germ layer compensation. Dev. Biol. 341, 256–266 (2010).

3. C. G. Extavour, The fate of isolated blastomeres with respect to germ cell formation in the amphipod crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis. Dev. Biol. 277, 387–402 (2005).

4. A. R. Nast, C. G. Extavour, Ablation of a Single Cell From Eight-cell Embryos of the Amphipod Crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis. J. Vis. Exp., 51073 (2014).

5. T. Gupta, C. G. Extavour, Identification of a putative germ plasm in the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. EvoDevo 4, 34 (2013).

6. A. Martin, J. M. Serano, E. Jarvis, H. S. Bruce, J. Wang, S. Ray, C. A. Barker, L. C. O’Connell, N. H. Patel, CRISPR/Cas9 Mutagenesis Reveals Versatile Roles of Hox Genes in Crustacean Limb Specification and Evolution. Curr. Biol. 26, 14–26 (2016).

7. D. Kao, A. G. Lai, E. Stamataki, S. Rosic, N. Konstantinides, E. Jarvis, A. D. Donfrancesco, N. Pouchkina-Stancheva, M. Sémon, M. Grillo, H. Bruce, S. Kumar, I. Siwanowicz, A. Le, A. Lemire, M. B. Eisen, C. Extavour, W. E. Browne, C. Wolff, M. Averof, N. H. Patel, P. Sarkies, A. Pavlopoulos, A. Aboobaker, The genome of the crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis, a model for animal development, regeneration, immunity and lignocellulose digestion. eLife 5, e20062 (2016).

8. J. M. Serano, A. Martin, D. M. Liubicich, E. Jarvis, H. S. Bruce, K. La, W. E. Browne, J. Grimwood, N. H. Patel, Comprehensive analysis of Hox gene expression in the amphipod crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis. Dev. Biol. 409, 297–309 (2016).

9. H. S. Bruce, N. H. Patel, Knockout of crustacean leg patterning genes suggests that insect wings and body walls evolved from ancient leg segments. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 4, 1703–1712 (2020).

10. C. M. Clark-Hachtel, Y. Tomoyasu, Two sets of candidate crustacean wing homologues and their implication for the origin of insect wings. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 4, 1694–1702 (2020).

11. H. S. Bruce, N. H. Patel, The Daphnia carapace and other novel structures evolved via the cryptic persistence of serial homologs. Curr. Biol. 32, 3792-3799.e3 (2022).

12. N. Konstantinides, M. Averof, A Common Cellular Basis for Muscle Regeneration in Arthropods and Vertebrates. Science 343, 788–791 (2014).

13. F. Alwes, C. Enjolras, M. Averof, Live imaging reveals the progenitors and cell dynamics of limb regeneration. eLife 5, e19766 (2016).

14. C. Sinigaglia, A. Almazán, M. Lebel, M. Sémon, B. Gillet, S. Hughes, E. Edsinger, M. Averof, M. Paris, Distinct gene expression dynamics in developing and regenerating crustacean limbs. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 119, e2119297119 (2022).

15. A. Almazán, Ç. Çevrim, J. M. Musser, M. Averof, M. Paris, Crustacean leg regeneration restores complex microanatomy and cell diversity. Sci. Adv. 8, eabn9823 (2022).

16. B. L. Steinert, L. Blondel, C. Kuyyamudi, E. Stamataki, A. Pavlopoulos, C. G. Extavour, Lineage domains and cytoskeletal cables organize a cellular square grid in a crustacean. bioRxiv, 2025.08.31.673345 (2026).

17. C. Wolff, J.-Y. Tinevez, T. Pietzsch, E. Stamataki, B. Harich, L. Guignard, S. Preibisch, S. Shorte, P. J. Keller, P. Tomancak, A. Pavlopoulos, Multi-view light-sheet imaging and tracking with the MaMuT software reveals the cell lineage of a direct developing arthropod limb. eLife 7, e34410 (2018).

18. D. J. Cislo, F. Yang, H. Qin, A. Pavlopoulos, M. J. Bowick, S. J. Streichan, Active cell divisions generate fourfold orientationally ordered phase in living tissue. Nat. Phys. 19, 1201–1210 (2023).

19. C. Wittfoth, S. Harzsch, C. Wolff, A. Sombke, The “amphi”-brains of amphipods: new insights from the neuroanatomy of Parhyale hawaiensis (Dana, 1853). Front. Zool. 16, 30 (2019).

20. S. Raspe, K. Kümmerlen, S. Harzsch, Immunolocalization of SIFamide-like neuropeptides in the adult and developing central nervous system of the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis (Malacostraca, Peracarida, Amphipoda). Arthropod Struct. Dev. 77, 101309 (2023).

21. A. P. Ramos, O. Gustafsson, N. Labert, I. Salecker, D.-E. Nilsson, M. Averof, Analysis of the genetically tractable crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis reveals the organisation of a sensory system for low-resolution vision. BMC Biol. 17, 67 (2019).

22. E. R. Kwiatkowski, Y. Schnytzer, J. J. C. Rosenthal, P. Emery, Behavioral circatidal rhythms require Bmal1 in Parhyale hawaiensis. Curr. Biol. 33, 1867-1882.e5 (2023).

23. A. Oliphant, C. Y. Sia, C. P. Kyriacou, D. C. Wilcockson, M. H. Hastings, Expression of clock genes tracks daily and tidal time in brains of intertidal crustaceans Eurydice pulchra and Parhyale hawaiensis. Curr. Biol. 35, 2802-2815.e5 (2025).

24. V. Louis, Z. Bellido, A. Helfenbein, J. J. C. Rosenthal, P. Emery, Core circadian clock genes control molecular and behavioral circatidal rhythms in Parhyale hawaiensis. bioRxiv, 2026.02.27.708297 (2026).

25. M. C. Artal, A. dos Santos, T. B. Henry, G. de A. Umbuzeiro, Development of an acute toxicity test with the tropical marine amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. Ecotoxicology 27, 103–108 (2018).

26. A. dos Santos, G. de A. Umbuzeiro, Proposal of a chronic toxicity test using the tropical epibenthic amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. Mar. Pollut. Bull. 194, 115375 (2023).

27. A. dos Santos, M. T. Botelho, M. Vannuci-Silva, M. C. Artal, F. I. Vacchi, G. R. Magalhães, V. Gomes, T. B. Henry, G. de A. Umbuzeiro, The amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis as a promising model in ecotoxicology. Chemosphere 307, 135959 (2022).

28. A. dos Santos, M. T. Botelho, W. R. Joviano, V. Gomes, J. R. M. C. da Silva, G. de A. Umbuzeiro, Characterization of hemocytes from the marine amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis (Dana 1853): Setting the basis for immunotoxicological studies. Invertebr. Biol. 142 (2023).

29. S. Laramore, E. Albright, Influence of temperature on production of the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. BMC Zool.10, 6 (2025).

Featured image by Longhua Guo from the Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory. Imaged on a Zeiss LSM 780.

With most first-year PhD students starting graduate programs this month, it seemed like a good time to address the most important dilemma faced by many incoming PhD students—how to choose rotation labs. Although perhaps obvious to those of us with some experience, many of the key factors are often overlooked by early career scientists. This article on helpimascientist.com is my attempt at a thorough and clear-eyed view of what you should consider in making this decision.

By: The FlyPower Team

From July 27–28, 2026, the Institute of Biosciences at the University of São Paulo (IB-USP) hosted the FlyPower Meeting 2026, held as an official satellite event of the XXIII Congress of the Brazilian Society for Cell Biology (SBBC).

Figure 1: FlyPower Meeting attendees at the Universidade de São Paulo.

Bringing together research groups from institutions across Brazil, including USP, USP-RP, UNESP-Araraquara, UNIFESP, PUC-Campinas, UNICAMP, UFTS, UFRJ, and UFAL, the meeting hosted approximately 60 attendees. The meeting served as a vibrant stage to demonstrate how Drosophila melanogaster—alongside other insect systems—continues to push the boundaries of biomedical science, bridging fundamental discovery (“bench”) to translational application (“bedside”). It was thought to enhance scientific network and friendship among the Brazilian community of drosophilists, who foster the model organism to understand basic science all the way to complex diseases. 

Broad Science: From Cancer to Neurobiology

Over two days, the scientific program showcased the remarkable versatility of the fly model across three primary thematic pillars: Cancer Biology, exploring tumor growth, microenvironment interactions, and oncogenic signaling using Drosophila models. Molecular Tools & DIY Innovation, demonstrating cutting-edge genetic manipulation techniques and accessible open-source hardware. This discussion was enhanced by the talk of André Chagas (Promethea / Prisma Science) with an insightful session on DIY devices for Drosophila research, demonstrating how open-source hardware can democratize experimental setups and expand lab capabilities. His company is up and running in Campinas, Brazil and can be accessed via their website (https://www.prismascience.net/en). Finally, Neurobiology & Neurodegeneration, where the researchers showcased their work on complex neural circuits, neurodegenerative disease models, and behavior.

Alongside student presentations, the meeting featured specials talks from principal investigators who brought essential perspectives to the program: Ana Bossolani (Ana Bossolani’s lab) and Alison Júlio (Alison Júlio’s lab), who delivered dedicated talks in the neurobiology session, exploring complex neural mechanisms and disease models for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, showcasing the use of Drosophila for the personalized medicine. Together, their contributions provided valuable methodological frameworks and cutting-edge insights that enriched the scientific program.

Community & Connection

Beyond the rigorous scientific discussions, the meeting prioritized building a strong community. Networking was woven into the schedule with dedicated coffee breaks and shared lunches, allowing participants from various institutions to connect and exchange ideas. The event closed on a high note with “Flipa ou Reflipa?”, a vibrant trivia game that combined knowledge of Drosophila science with plenty of fun, reinforcing the friendly and collaborative spirit of the FlyPower network.

Empowering the Next Generation of Brazilian Researchers

A central pillar of the FlyPower group’s mission is capacity building and fostering young talent within the Brazilian scientific ecosystem. With the exception of the key invited talks mentioned above, all oral sessions and flash talks throughout the meeting were delivered entirely by trainees—undergraduates, master’s students, PhD candidates, and postdocs.

This deliberate structure gave young scientists direct experience communicating their research on an international-standard stage, equipping future Brazilian biomedical researchers with essential skills in model organism genetics. Prof. Maria Vibranovski and her team of students and postdocs were crucial in organizing the meeting alongside the FlyPower group. One of the seniors in the group, Prof. Ricardo Guelerman Pinheiro Ramos, who also supervised many of the current PI’s in the community shared his thoughts with us:

“This Drosophila community grows stronger every year. This is our third meeting, and we are maturing our organization. I never imagined this would happen one day. This event is highlighted by the outstanding presentations of the students who are performing at a very high level, dominating the genetic toolkit existent in this fly system.”

Impact Beyond the Satellite Event: FlyPower at SBBC 2026

The strong presence and high scientific standard of the FlyPower community carried seamlessly into the main XXIII Congress of the Brazilian Society for Cell Biology (SBBC). FlyPower trainees actively presented their work across poster sessions, showcasing the breadth of research powered by model organism genetics in Brazil.

Highlighting the exceptional quality of work produced by young FlyPower researchers, undergraduate student Renata Campelo (from Prof. Lucas Anhezini’s lab / LAVITOX, Universidade Federal de Alagoas – UFAL) received an Honorable Mention for Best Poster in the Undergraduate Category (Iniciação Científica). It is common sense to the FlyPower group that the quality of her world shall pave the way to a great scientific career as she wishes. This prestigious recognition underscores how early-career trainees in Brazil are performing world-class science using Drosophila.

Figure 2: Prof Lucas Anhezini from UFAL and the undergrad student Renata Campelo after receiving honorable mention at the SBBC congress.

Additionally, a major highlight of the main congress was Symposium 08: Paracrine Signalling Controlling Cell Fate Decisions, chaired by Prof. Guilherme Oliveira Barbosa (UNICAMP). The session featured high-impact talks linking local leadership with international collaboration:

• Prof. Helena Marcolla Araujo (UFRJ) presented “How Sog moves BMPs: extracellular transport strategies across insects”, exploring morphogen gradient regulation across species.
• Jean-Paul Vincent (The Francis Crick Institute, UK) shared insights on “GAGs and planar Wnt Transport”.
• Prof. Guilherme Oliveira Barbosa (UNICAMP) delivered a presentation titled “HS-Beyond: the intracellular role of heparan sulfate in paracrine signaling”.

Figure 3: Helena Araujo (UFRJ – BR), Guilherme O. Barbosa (UNICAMP – BR) e Jean-Paul Vincent (Francis Crick – UK)

This integration between the FlyPower satellite meeting and the main SBBC congress highlights how the Brazilian Drosophila community is both training top-tier award-winning students and actively shaping cutting-edge cell biology research alongside international leaders.

Looking Ahead

The FlyPower Meeting 2026 demonstrated that the Brazilian Drosophila community is thriving, highly collaborative, and deeply committed to training world-class scientists. By mastering sophisticated fly genetics, these trainees are well-positioned to drive future discoveries in cell biology, human disease modeling, and biotechnology.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the FEW Foundation for their generous financial support, facilitated by alumna Prof. Maria Vibranovski, who was the local organizer of the event, together with her amazing team. We also extend our sincere gratitude to the organizing committee—Prof. Marcos Túlio Oliveira, Prof. Carlos Couto, Prof. Lucas Anhezini, and Prof. Guilherme Oliveira Barbosa. All their dedication were instrumental in the success of the FlyPower Meeting 2026.