Alex Neaverson is a third-year PhD student at the University of Cambridge, studying regeneration of the Hensen’s Node in chick embryos. Alex is a keen artist and has recently got into scientific illustration while doing an internship at a research charity. As a Node correspondent, she plans to use her artistic skills to create illustrated career timelines of developmental biologists and draw graphical summaries to highlight research conducted by different teams around the world.

Congratulations on being selected as one of our new correspondents! What made you decide to apply to become a Node correspondent?

I’ve known about the Node since I started my PhD in 2021. The Node’s a great resource for bringing developmental biologists together. I really like how there’s a mixture of scientific articles and opinion pieces, and I like the ‘Lab meeting’ posts where you get to know all the different labs. I especially like the SciArt profiles. I love seeing my two big passions — biology and art — mixed together, sometimes in really unusual ways. I’ve always kept art and science separate in my life, where science has been my job and art has been my hobby. But I recently started getting into scientific illustration. I thought considering the Node publishes the SciArt profiles, you might be open to something slightly different from a Correspondent. Maybe you’d like to have someone who can create illustrations as a means of communicating science, instead of purely writing text-based articles. I deliberated over it for a while, but I spoke to my PI and he thought it was a great idea, so I took a chance and clearly it paid off!

How did you get into scientific illustration?

Scientific illustration is something that is very new to me. Art has always been a hobby. I love painting people and animal portraits. I have only started doing scientific illustration during my internship with Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) last year. As part of my PhD course, I had to do a 3-month internship. There was an internship fair and while most organisations had very specific projects in mind, Jorge from ARUK’s Research team was very open to ideas and said that my project could depend on my interests.

My internship ended up being about translating research on dementia prevention into infographics that could be understood by a layperson. I wanted to do this in a more creative way. ARUK was very encouraging, and I was able to get a tablet to do digital illustration and attend online courses for Adobe Illustrator. The resource that I contributed to for ARUK is called the Impact Hub, which is used by the Science communication team and other teams in the charity to communicate the impact of the research funded by the charity. The infographics I created have to clearly communicate the science in a way that can be understood by anybody. That internship was where I started to meld science and art together.

Examples of illustrations Alex did during her internship at Alzheimer’s Research UK (click to enlarge image)

Apart from scientific illustration, have you done much science communication and public outreach?

Before I started my PhD, I worked as a research assistant at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. During the COVID lockdown, I had significantly less lab work to do. I started writing a blog together with a colleague, which was quite fun to do. I also completely revamped my department’s website because it was totally out of date and very boring to look at. I’d like to think I improved it! I’ve also taken part in several outreach activities for children, such as the Big Bang Fair at Birmingham NEC, and the Cambridge Festival last year.

What is your scientific background and what is your current research focus?

I did my undergrad in biomedical sciences in York. I was initially interested in human biology and disease. But it started to change over time as I did my degree. The programme was very open, so I was able to pick a lot of different modules. It was around second or third year when I started to show an interest in developmental biology, which probably had a lot to do with my lecturers. They were very passionate about their subject, and they transferred that passion to me.

In my final year, I did a project with Xenopus embryos, which I really enjoyed. When I finished at York, I thought the one experience that I lacked was with cell culture. I started looking for jobs where I could gain those skills, and ended up joining a core facility at the Sanger Institute where I primarily did stem cell differentiation projects. I learned how to work with iPSCs and differentiate them into neural lineages. But I started to miss working model organisms and I started to realise that I wanted to pursue my own research, which I didn’t have much freedom to do as a research assistant. That was when I decided to take on a PhD at Ben Stevenson’s lab in Cambridge.

Now, I work with very early chick embryos, and I’m interested in the role of Hensen’s Node, the so-called organiser in the chick embryo, during neural development. The node is thought to be responsible for releasing signals that pattern the neural territory. If you cut the node out of the embryo it will completely regenerate itself and the embryo carries on developing. I’m studying this regenerative process and what the triggers for tissue re-specification might be and whether this has knock on effect on the development of the embryo.

You mentioned you plan to create illustrated content for the Node. Can you elaborate on your ideas?

I’d like to use my illustration skills to create new kinds of content. For example, I’d like to interview developmental biologists about their career paths and create illustrated timelines of their scientific life. I think this will be really fun to create and I think people will be interested to learn about how other people in the field got to where they are today.

I’m also thinking about doing graphical research summaries about an individual or a lab’s research, similar to a paper’s graphical abstract. I’m not sure who I’m going to interview yet, but I’ll probably start with my own lab and people that I know and then branch out.

Will you also write for the Node as well?

I’d like to gain skills in writing as well. One of the things I want to improve is how to adapt the way I write for different audiences, which I think is a really important skill as a scientist. I’d like to make content that blends both text writing and illustration.

Apart from gaining a bit more writing experience, what else do you hope to gain from being a correspondent?

I’d like to meet other people who have similar interests. I’m thinking about a potential career path into science communication after I finish my PhD. I’d like to get to know people and network and find out more about careers in this area.

Finally, what do you like to do in your spare time?

At the end of my undergraduate degree, I loved cooking and baking so much that I convinced myself that I didn’t want to do science anymore and that I actually wanted to be a recipe developer. I felt very conflicted about this because I just spent four years of my life working towards a career in science. I ended up going to my first job in science anyway at the Sanger Institute. I’m glad I did because it did revive my interest in science.

I still do a lot of baking in my spare time and my lab is more than happy to eat all of my creations. Some of my favourite bakes have been embryo themed. I’ve made some cupcakes for a friend’s viva with the stages of zebrafish development. Another friend is a fellow chick embryologist. When she finished her viva, I made some early chick culture cupcakes that were really realistic. So realistic that maybe they were slightly off putting to some people!

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Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to bring you a 2-day workshop at the Francis Crick Institute that will gather leading experts in the field to break new ground in cell-type evo-devo. This workshop is free and open to all, but you do need to register (link).

Cells are the fundamental building blocks of living systems. Understanding the differentiation of cell types as well as the origin of novel cell types remains a central problem in developmental and evolutionary biology. Today, advances in molecular techniques have enabled the molecular profiling of individual cells, providing fresh opportunities for new insights into cell type development and evolution. This meeting will be of interest to anyone working with single-cell data.

Speakers:

Pawel Burkhardt (University of Bergen): “The deep evolutionary origins of neurons and nervous systems”

Margarida Cardoso-Moreira (Francis Crick Institute): “Origins of cells and organs – the view from the placenta”

Douglas Erwin (Smithsonian Institute): “Alternative models for formation of cells”

Jacob Musser (Yale University): TBA

Joe Parker (Caltech): “The cellular substrate of evolutionary novelty”

Mihaela Pavlicev (University of Vienna): “Cell types as characters”

Arnau Sebé-Pedrós (CRG – Barcelona): “Early animal cell type diversity, evolution, and regulation”

Stefan Semrau (University of Leiden): “How many cell types are there?”

Francesca Spagnoli (Kings College London): “Mapping the emergence of lineage identities in time & space”

Uli Technau (University of Vienna): TBA

Gunter Wagner (Yale University): “How to distinguish cell types from mere similarity clusters? “

There will also be two panel discussions, and there is plenty of time allocated for discussion and mixing within the schedule.

More information can be found here

All the best, 

James DiFrisco and Margarida Cardoso Moreira

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What we see

Approximately 1 in 20 babies are born with severe anatomical malformations. Each year this equates to 8 million affected newborns, of which 300,000 die within the first four weeks of life. With advances in sequencing technology, the identification of possible disease-causing changes in the genetic code of these patients has accelerated. However, it is a major challenge to prove which of these genetic changes, also called variants, cause these malformations, as well as to establish the cellular mechanisms by which these changes disrupt normal development. How do we distinguish problematic inherited or spontaneous variants in DNA from the many benign changes, and prove that they disrupt normal development? Can we better understand why some patients are more affected than others even though they carry similar, if not the same, genetic changes? How do important environmental influences, such as maternal health during pregnancy, modify how these genetic changes exhibit themselves in terms of severity and spectrum of patient presentations? Many genes that are implicated in congenital anomalies play multiple roles in different tissues during prenatal and postnatal development; thus, these genes are difficult to study in humans, even in stem cell ‘disease-in-a-dish’ models.

What we plan to do

Working closely with clinicians and researchers who submit variants of uncertain significance (VUS) via our portal, the Congenital Anomalies Cluster will create precisely engineered mouse models of patient variants, which will:

1. Help clinicians establish genetic diagnoses
2. Drive increased understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying congenital anomalies.

Our cluster has broad developmental biology expertise and together with the MRC National Mouse Genetics Network (NMGN) we have built a pipeline to investigate the complex interactions that are disrupted during early life, across multiple organ systems. Through the detection of overlapping phenotypes in F0 embryo screening, we hope to provide clinicians with sufficient evidence to confirm a genetic diagnosis in their families. The generation of clinically relevant mouse lines to study pathogenic mechanisms allows exploration of the consequences of genetic mutations during the critical postnatal period (automated live monitoring), and during disease progression later in life. These models will serve as improved platforms for developing much-needed therapeutic interventions.

The portal

Part of the remit of the Congenital Anomalies Cluster is to help clinicians and researchers establish genetic diagnoses by modelling VUS in mice. Our submissions portal is open to clinicians and researchers worldwide.

Submitted VUS will be assessed by our Clinical Advisory Board who will meet at least twice a year.

They will consider and rank the submitted VUS based on the following Congenital Anomalies Cluster priorities (in order of importance): 1) New disease gene. 2) Known disease gene, but new phenotype association or novel allelic disorder. 3) Known disease gene with difficult-to-interpret VUS; e.g., nearby significant variants such as structural variants, or deep intronic single nucleotide variants. 4) Known disease genes where broader investigation of the mouse model could lead to new insights into pathogenic mechanism and/or therapy development.

Considerations:

Contributing teams are ideally clinically led or have strong clinical engagement, to efficiently return diagnostic information and enable further assessment of patient phenotypes. The clinical features of your patient should be present at birth and should overlap with the specialities of our developmental biology team: craniofacial, skeletal, heart, neural tube, kidney, and ciliopathies. More weight will be given to syndromic conditions to enable the simultaneous study of multiple systems in the mouse.

Please follow this link to the submission portal and feel free to download and share the flyer above.

For further information please email Karen Liu karen.liu@kcl.ac.uk or Stephen Twigg stephen.twigg@imm.ox.ac.uk

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In the last of the series of speakers from Development’s 2023 Pathway to Independence programme, we hear from two researchers studying the role of RNA biology in development.

Wednesday 6 March – 16:00 GMT

At the discretion of the speakers, the webinar will be recorded for viewing on demand. To see the other webinars scheduled in our series, and to catch up on previous talks, please visit: thenode.biologists.com/devpres

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A press release related to the Research Article in Development “Developmental regulation of cellular metabolism is required for intestinal elongation and rotation“.

How does our intestine, which can be at least 15 feet long, fit properly inside our bodies? As our digestive system grows, the gut tube goes through a series of dramatic looping and rotation to package the lengthening intestine. Failure of the gut to rotate properly during development results in a prevalent, but poorly understood, birth anomaly called intestinal malrotation. Now, in a study published in the journal Development, scientists from North Carolina State University have uncovered a potential cause of this life-threatening condition.

Intestinal malrotation affects 1 in 500 births but the underlying causes are not well understood. To find out why gut revolution could go amiss, scientists need to first understand intestinal rotation during normal development, a complex process that still baffles biologists.

The team of scientists, led by Dr Nanette Nascone-Yoder, decided to make use of a well-established system in frogs. “As vertebrates, frogs and humans share a common ancestor and have many similar anatomical features, including an intestine that rotates in a counter-clockwise direction,” explained Dr Nascone-Yoder. “Because frog embryos develop in only a few days and are highly experimentally accessible, they allow us to quickly test new hypotheses about how and why development goes awry during malrotation.”

“Frog embryos develop in a petri dish and are transparent when the intestine is developing, so they can be exposed to drugs or environmental chemicals to screen for substances capable of producing malrotation,” said Dr Nascone-Yoder. One of the compounds the team screened was the herbicide atrazine. They found that exposure to atrazine greatly increased the frequency at which frog intestines rotated in the reverse (clockwise) direction and decided to focus on atrazine to further investigate intestinal malrotation.

Dr Julia Grzymkowski, who led the experimental work of this study, found that exposure to atrazine disrupted metabolism (chemical reactions that provide energy for biological processes) in the frog embryos. Metabolic imbalance in the embryos derailed a series of cellular processes in the gut — cells could not grow, divide and rearrange appropriately to drive the proper intestinal elongation and rotation.

“Although we found that atrazine causes malrotation in frogs, these results do not necessarily mean that this herbicide causes malrotation in humans, because, in our screen, the tadpoles were exposed to 1000-fold higher levels than are typically found in the environment,” Dr Nascone-Yoder emphasised, “but our findings do strongly suggest that disturbing the same cellular metabolic processes affected by atrazine, for example, via exposure to other chemicals in the environment and/or genetic variations that affect metabolism, could contribute to intestinal malrotation in humans.”

This study is just beginning to unravel what happens during embryonic development that leads to intestinal malrotation. Dr Nascone-Yoder’s team hopes to extend this work: “Our results have provided new avenues to explore the underlying causes of this prevalent birth anomaly. We are now starting to dive deeper into the cellular events that coordinate the complicated process of intestinal elongation and rotation.”

———-

To find out more about the story behind the paper, check out this interview we did with first author Julia Grzymkowski and corresponding author Nanette Nascone-Yoder.

———-

Reference: Grzymkowski, J.K., Chiu, M.Y., Jima, D.D., Wyatt, B.H., Jayachandran, S.M., Stutts, W.L., Nascone-Yoder, N.M. (2024) Developmental regulation of cellular metabolism is required for intestinal elongation and rotation. Development, 151, dev202020. doi:10.1242/dev.202020

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What is Daniocell?

Daniocell is an exploratory tool that allows users to navigate pre-computed, time-resolved gene expression information for each cell type during zebrafish development. We profiled embryos across the first 5 days of development, as the animal progresses from a field of unpatterned cells to a swimming, feeding, and behaving animal. Daniocell showcases gene expression information for each gene in the zebrafish genome across most zebrafish cell types as they develop. For users interested in specific cell types at different stages of their development, Daniocell also holds cell type-specific pages that contains information on the most specific and most highly expressed genes within each cell type.

What inspired the development of Daniocell?

Single-cell genomics studies generate massive amounts of information, much of which is beyond the authors’ analytical goals, but could be highly useful to other members of the community. For instance, in our study, we focused on two tissues and made discoveries about several under-characterized cell types, but there are 17 other tissues that remain! Not every scientist wants to become an expert in analyzing these types of data. So, we made a list of the questions that we thought were most frequently addressed from these types of data and built a website to answer them. We hope that sharing this data with everyone will accelerate discovery-driven research within the community.

Daniocell was created from the perspective of active developmental biologists; we were hoping to create the resource we wished to have access to while performing our studies. We also tried to address feedback that we received about portals from our previous studies to try to make this one even more useful. We made some trade-offs in its development: the results are all pre-computed, which means that users cannot generate arbitrary plots to address specific questions; on the other hand, it means the website is fast, responsive, and inexpensive to run, hopefully allowing us to fund its support long-term.

How can scientists use Daniocell in their research?

Daniocell was designed to quickly and easily answer the most common questions we expect researchers might want to ask from our data, namely: (1) When and where is any given gene expressed? (2) Which genes have the most similar and dissimilar gene expression patterns? (3) When is each cell type present and undergoing the cell cycle? and (4) Which genes does each cell type express most strongly and most specifically, and how does that compare to related cell types?

To this end, each gene page in Daniocell demonstrates (1) that gene’s expression pattern (as UMAP and dot plot) across each tissue and cell type, resolved by time, and (2) which genes have the most similar and dissimilar expression patterns across all cells and each tissue. Additionally, each cell cluster page demonstrates (1) the developmental stages of cells in the cluster, (2) whether they are undergoing the cell cycle (based on their expression of cell cycle-associated transcripts), and (3) the most specific and most highly expressed genes within each cluster.

Of course, researchers might want to generate plots with curated sets of genes or groups of cells. To facilitate this simple/easy reuse of the data, we have the fully processed Seurat object posted on the Daniocell front page, along with our annotations, so that researchers can jump right in. These data can also be used with label transfer approaches, to transfer our annotations onto newly generated scRNAseq data; this process isn’t perfect, but can accelerate progress through analyzing scRNAseq data generated across similar stages from different perturbation conditions.

Who are the people behind the resource?

This resource was designed by the Farrell Lab at NICHD/NIH. The primary people behind Daniocell were Dr. Jeffrey Farrell (PI) and Dr. Abhinav Sur (postdoc).

Abhinav Sur: I began working on zebrafish in 2020 when I started my postdoc in the Farrell Lab at NICHD. My Ph.D. was on Evodevo where I studied the evolution of nervous systems using an annelid called Capitella teleta. I generated one of the first single-cell atlases in an annelid and first single-cell atlas of Capitella teleta. The most exciting part of working on Daniocell was that it was like a “treasure hunt”, as I dug through this large dataset to uncover hidden biology. The fact that the community have found Daniocell to be a useful resource has made this experience quite rewarding. In future, I hope to continue using single-cell genomics approaches to understand how cell types are constantly produced at the right time and place in constitutively regenerating tissues such as the intestine and how their dysregulation causes disease.

Jeffrey Farrell: I’m the head of the Unit on Cell Specification and Differentiation in the NICHD Intramural Research Program. I’ve been studying developmental biology for 17 years and started using zebrafish as a research model organism a little over a decade ago. Daniocell is a continuation of my long-term efforts to profile zebrafish development using single-cell genomics approaches and to thereby uncover interesting biology that was previously missed to study using both modern and classical approaches. For me, one of the most fun parts of this project has been to hear from many of you how Daniocell has helped you in your own research.

How can researchers help and contribute to the resource?

We are very happy to receive suggestions about improvements to the annotations and metadata from members of the community, based on either newly generated information or other labs’ expertise in particular tissues. These should further increase the value of the gene expression information in Daniocell over time. They can be submitted via email, and there is a template for the information to include on the Daniocell front page.

What are the next steps for Daniocell?

We plan to update Daniocell 1–2 times per year based on community input into cell annotations and to keep it up to date with new releases of the zebrafish genome. Additionally, we hope to add a tutorial to the site demonstrating how to use the Daniocell dataset with label transfer approaches to facilitate draft annotations of newly generated scRNAseq data. We are also exploring the possibility of integrating some additional datasets into the portal or adding a more interactive component that could be used to generate custom visualization figures from the data.

Visit Daniocell or read the accompanying manuscript.

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Leonora Martínez Nuñez has a background in microbiology and fungal cell biology. She is now a scientific visualization specialist at UMass Chan Medical School. Find out more about Leonora’s artistic influences and her path to a career in scientific illustration.

Can you tell us about your background and what you work on now?
I grew up in Mexico, where I studied Biology and later obtained a PhD in Microbiology. I immigrated to the U.S. in 2017 to train as a postdoctoral researcher studying membrane trafficking and exocytosis in different organisms. However, I’ve always been an artist at heart. In 2020, I decided to pursue a career in Scientific Illustration and started carving a path for myself in the field. I don’t have formal training as an artist, and I learned new skills through tutorials and workshops. In 2023, I left the bench and started working full-time in science communication and outreach, where I had the chance to do creative work as a scientific visualization specialist in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology Department at UMass Chan Medical School.

Were you always going to be a scientist?
Officially, yes. Growing up, I was interested in viruses, insects, and chemistry. I remember myself, as a kid, telling people I wanted to be a chemist or biologist and find the cure for HIV. I laugh about that nowadays because I didn’t go into virology or immunology; instead, I studied fungi for several years of my training.

And what about art – have you always enjoyed it?
I was always pursuing some artistic or creative endeavors on the side, like contemporary dance, folkloric dance, theater, clay modeling and sculpture, building scale wood boats, painting, or drawing. My hometown, Xalapa in México, is such a cultural hub that it was impossible not to be drawn to these activities.

What or who are your most important artistic influences?
I’d say that my favorite artists are Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. I want to portray such magic in my work, but that is a work in progress. In my current style, I think I was significantly influenced by Dr. Verena Resch (Luminous Lab) since I learned a lot from her tutorials. I also admire the work of Olena Shmahalo (Nature in theory). I want to add that Dr. Matteo Farinella significantly influenced me and encouraged me to pursue science illustration as a career.

How do you make your art?
I use a computer and a free program for 3D modeling called Blender. I use a lot of Molecular Nodes (a tool fro Blender created by Dr. Brady Johnston). I mix it up with basic programs for vector and pixel-based design. I extensively use the 3D coordinates deposited in the Protein Data Base (PDB) and chemical formulas in ChemSpider and Chempub. I like to doodle ideas with pen and paper, which I then translate onto the 3D space. So far, I’m mostly doing 3D images (ultimately 2D with 3D elements), short animations, and vector graphics. My first step is always to read the science and do my research. I want to be as scientifically accurate as possible. I read a lot about different fields, and the best part is that I’m learning so much from this job.

Does your art influence your science at all, or are they separate worlds?
While working at a research bench, my art helped me understand my science better. The extensive research done to translate it into a visual with the most accuracy possible makes you question everything. It also helped me present my science in a better light. My whole world is a mix of science and art, so I’d say that science influenced my art and vice versa.

What are you thinking of working on next?
I have many projects in the works, but I want to focus mainly on helping other scientists tell their stories visually. I’m part of a research core at UMass Chan, where I manage the Science Visualization Services, so I can help researchers translate their scientific discoveries into striking visuals. We are open for commissions! Additionally, I want to put more of my energy into community outreach. I want to encourage younger audiences to think about science and art as converging worlds, so I’ll also be working on that.

Find out more about Leonora:

Website: www.leonoramartinez.com
Instagram: radiant_molecules
X: @leonoramtzn
Mastodon: @leonoramtzn@mstdn.social

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James Zwierzynski is currently a first-year PhD student at Stanford University, investigating vascular morphogenesis and growth in the placenta. With a background in humanities, James aims to combine his interests in philosophy and science to write about topics in reproductive biology and philosophy of science. We caught up with James to find out more about his career and his plans as a Node correspondent.

You’ve been selected as one of our new correspondents, congrats! What made you decide to apply?

Development is one of my favourite journals to read and I’m just a giant science nerd. Reading Development meant I very quickly ended up discovering the Node and FocalPlane. I love this broader community of developmental biologists who are really interested in the same things that I am. I also have to admit that I am a huge fangirl for John Wallingford. He’s a PI in Texas and one of the things his lab works on is Shroom3, a gene that my old lab was very interested in. I got introduced to him through his papers and I was like, “Oh my gosh, we’re working on the same gene that nobody works on!” I very quickly discovered that he writes about developmental biology for not only scientists but also for the wider community. His #DevBiolWriteClub posts on the Node advocate that to become a good scientist, you need to build your skills in reading and writing. When I saw the call for new Node Correspondents, I thought this would be a good opportunity to improve my skills in thinking, writing, and communicating about science.

Have you done much science writing or other forms of science communication before?

I think that like so many scientists, I’ve mostly done writing while preparing manuscripts, but I haven’t done writing where I pick a topic and write a long form post. I think that is something I’d like to build on because it’s a skill that will not only help me become better at communicating more broadly but make me a more well-rounded scientist.

This quarter I’m teaching in a course for undergrads called ‘bioBUDS: Building Up Developing Scientists’. It’s a student- and community-oriented course, focused on helping students from underrepresented backgrounds in science thrive through workshops, skills, and resources. I’m giving a lecture later this quarter that I’ve titled ‘Meta-Science’. It’s about what can, should (or even shouldn’t!) science tell us. I plan to go through why the scientific thought process is the way it is. We often think of the scientific method as generating a hypothesis, gathering data, and then reporting your results. But when you look back at the intellectual history of science, there are cultural and political events that have shaped the way that we think about science. Especially in the Interwar period, when logical positivism sought to unite science and philosophy, and proofs and direct observation as “truth” in science. I would argue that maybe we don’t have to think about science in this way – it actually has tough ramifications for the public’s view of science as purely “objective”. I will also explain how science relies upon both revision but also reduction. On the grand scale it’s all just hypotheses; you are never really going to prove anything for sure. That lecture is one of the ways I’m trying to do more science communication and I’d like to do more through other channels too, depending on how busy I am throughout the quarter.

What is your background and what are you currently researching on?

Most of my research experience was at Indiana University School of Medicine; I was there for about two and a half years after I graduated from the University of Notre Dame. I worked on heart development, and the pathways altered in structural heart defects, specifically focusing on non-canonical Wnt signalling. I fell in love with research and decided I was going to apply for a PhD. Now I’m at Stanford and joined Kristy Red-Horse’s lab. I pivoted a little bit from a cardiac lab to a vascular biology lab. I’m specifically interested in vascular morphogenesis and growth in my favourite organ, which is the woefully understudied placenta. There are so many mysteries about it. I’m really excited about finding out more.

What ideas do you have for the Node?

One of my ideas relates to my current research. I consider myself a developmental biologist who’s concerned with vascular biology but also reproduction. I plan to write about reproductive biology, which I think is a really understudied field.

I would also like to delve into the ideas in philosophy of science. One of the things that really inspired me as a scientist is my background in the humanities and my training as a philosopher. I’d like to explore the assumptions behind the way that we do science, and the implications of some scientific work that we don’t often think about. A wonderful example of this that I read recently was the book, Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life, by Jane Maienschein. She traces the history of microscopy and embryology alongside advances in technologies, such as cloning and IVF. She argues that the embryo in many forms has influenced the way in which we culturally and politically think about science itself. Now, her book is approaching a decade old, yet the ideas she presents are perhaps more relevant than ever. I would really love to write about the ways in which the cutting edge of developmental and stem cell biology are still important, even though we’re not cloning Dolly the Sheep. There was controversy this past year over the recent stem cell embryo models; we had research that got picked up by the media and brought into the public realm outside of the scientific community. I think that writing about these things in a really thoughtful way is important. I would like to write about what is developmental biology doing today, what does that mean for the world and how we’re thinking about science.

What do you hope to gain from the experience of being a Node correspondent?

My ultimate goal is to inspire people to read something that I’ve written and be excited about it. I hope other people would be excited about science and science-adjacent topics, specifically related to development because that’s the thing that I love.

My secondary goal, thinking about my own growth, is to grow my skills in writing, take ideas from my head and put them on paper in a cohesive way. I think that it will not only help me to be a better communicator in different ways, but I would argue that would make me a better scientist too.

Is there anything that people might find surprising about you?

Some people are surprised that I studied philosophy for a while. I had kind of an odd path to my PhD. Another surprising fact is that I am a twin, and my oldest brothers are also twins. It’s a little bit weird to have so many twins in the family, but I’m special in that I’m the only scientist!

Outside of the lab, what do you like to do in your spare time?

In my spare time, I spoil my cat and a dog. I read through tonnes of books, and I have an ever-expanding book collection. I also make a lot of pottery – the most recent things I’ve been working on are a series of weird fruits with anthropomorphic facial features on them. I’d like to make science-inspired pottery too; as somebody who is obsessed with the placenta, I think it’s the perfect coaster shape. Kristy, my PI, much of her career on collateral artery development in the heart. I think a heart cross-section would be a great coaster as well. I would also like to make little espresso cups for the espresso machine in the lab and carve something science-related on the side of the cups, like the different stages of embryo development. I have all these ideas, but I just need to take the time to go to the studio, it ends up being really analogous to my work in the lab. I have a whole list on my computer of things to do in the ceramic studio right next to the list of things to do in the lab.

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“I want to show children that mathematics is not boring!”

Growing up, Luisma Escudero has always been fascinated by geometry and how patterns are created in nature. That fascination led Luisma to do biology in his undergraduate degree, followed by a PhD in developmental biology, studying the peripheral nervous system development in Drosophila. As a postdoc, his research focussed on morphogenesis. Now, he is a professor and researcher at the University of Seville and Instituto de Biomedicina de Sevilla (IBiS). His lab combines developmental biology, computational biology, biophysics, and mathematics to understand how tissues are organised in development and disease contexts.

In 2018, his group discovered a geometric shape in epithelial cells that had not been described before — the scutoid. The work attracted a lot of attention from the media. Eventually an editor from a publisher approached Luisma. “They propose that I could write a serious book about how mathematicians, physicists and biologists got together to make the discovery.” recounted Luisma over a Zoom call. “I was very happy about this, but after a while I realised that I was quickly going to get bored writing that book!” Instead, he proposed to the publisher about writing a book with a lot of illustrations, because those scientific concepts need to be visualised for people to understand. But it was out the publisher’s budget to find an illustrator.

In the end, Luisma contacted an illustrator, Raquel Gu, who has experience drawing scientific and mathematical concepts. The two of them started searching for a publisher. Most were not interested, but eventually they found one, who suggested they should focus on writing for children. “We decided that the book will feature me and my children — it was going to be a family book. I was so happy about that decision!”

Fast forward to February 2023, the illustrated book “Papá ¿cómo se enroscan las caracolas?” was published in Spain. In the book, Luisma and his family (three curious children and a sarcastic cat that represents Valentina, Luisma’s wife) go on a walk to discover the scutoid shape and other beautiful geometries hidden in nature.

“The book starts off with my children making jokes about my research and me explaining how my research is like a hobby to me,” said Luisma while flipping through the book, which he had right beside his office desk. “Then we go on a walk looking for different geometries in nature. There are 15 chapters. 3 of them are about scutoids. We talked about the more traditional patterns like honeycomb and zebra stripes.” The book goes on to explain more complicated concepts such as the shape of eggs and butterfly wings patterns.

Illustrating scientific concepts

Explaining 3D shapes and patterns in 2D must be challenging, but Luisma said it was all credits to Raquel, the illustrator. “Everything we explain in the book is supported by the drawings. The illustrator used a lot of imagination. For example, she managed to show that scutoids have different neighbours apically and basally in an illustration. I think Raquel hated me when she had to draw all the lava rocks and the tiny fractal cones in the Romanesco broccoli!”

The scientist-illustrator partnership worked well for Luisma and Raquel right from the beginning. They first designed the characters, assigning different colours to every person’s (and the cat’s) speech bubble. For every chapter they met up to discuss all the details, including where the speech bubbles would be and how many times each character speaks. “Raquel also does humour comic strips so she would put jokes in the illustrations. It has been like a lot of fun doing this with her and now we are very good friends. She loves the children, and the children love her. It’s been a very nice collaboration.”

When asked about how they manage to find the balance of communicating the essence of science while making it simple enough for kids to understand and find interesting, Luisma acknowledged that it was a challenge. “We had to keep the story short and make it into a dialogue. I would test my ideas with my eldest child Margarita. I would ask her questions to see what the answer was and what follow up questions she would ask. I had to simplify the explanations a lot in the story, but the scientific rigor is still there. I cannot invent something to make it easier.”

“It has been an adventure!”

To Luisma, publishing the book has been a fun process. “I was really emotional. I never thought I was going to publish a book, nonetheless a children’s book about what I like! Even though I was writing the book while there were a lot of other things going on at work, I was always ahead of the deadline, because for me it was like a hobby.”

Since the book’s publication, Luisma has given talks and attended book signings at book fairs around Spain — Granada, Seville, and the biggest one in Madrid. He also gave presentations at schools and libraries about the book. “The presentations at the library have been a lot of fun because I did a small performance with my children. We prepared a detailed script together and acted out some scenes from the book. My youngest one was only 3 years old when we started doing this.”

To accompany the book, Luisma designed a cut-out activity to give to children at book fairs and library events.

For the Node readers who would like to make a scutoid at home yourself (with or without children), you can download the high-resolution version.

“I’ll never stop doing science communication.”

Luisma has always been an avid science communicator. Now, he is taking advantage of the popularity of the sctutoid to continue this path. A textbook publisher even asked to feature Luisma and the scutoid discovery in their primary school material. “For me it’s crazy that a paper we published five years ago is now being taught in schools!”

Since the book, Luisma has been working on a few other projects, but he admitted that it has not been as easy as the first book. He has to put more effort to be motivated. He has recently been asked to write and deliver a 5-minute standup comedy script for secondary school students about geometry and other topics like artificial intelligence.

 “I feel like when scientists do science communication, they can really make a change and get more children and adults interested in science. When I was in the UK, I felt that the importance of science is more valued. There are research charities, lots of TV programmes about science and private institutions that fund research. Here in Spain, it’s not the same. One of my wishes when I came back to Spain 14 years ago was to get people more into science.”

Translating the book to other languages

Luisma is actively trying to find a publisher in the UK. “A lot of people asked me if the book is in English. That’s why I’m trying to get the interest of some UK publishers. Nothing in the book is very local to Spain and it’s about nature so it shouldn’t be too difficult to translate.”

Wouldn’t it be great for kids from non-Spanish speaking backgrounds to enjoy Luisma’s book and learn to appreciate the hidden geometries in nature too?

Find out more about Luisma:

Website: https://lmescudero.blogspot.com/

Twitter/X: @lmescu

Bridge of Sighs, Cambridge, UK:

“In developmental biology people say that epithelial cells are the building blocks of an organism. I also have more or less 100 kilos of construction blocks — they are the Spanish version of Lego, called Tente. I played with Tente as a child to the point of almost becoming a professional!”

(2 votes)

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It’s now been 4 months since I started as a Junior Group Leader at the ZMBP in Tübingen, Germany. And I love it. But while I quickly found the literal fertilizer, there are many things I am still learning or that I am not even aware of yet. I came in expecting to learn a lot in my first few months, but my biggest surprise has been how it feels like I have accomplished very little. I’ve been making progress but there are so many things going on that each individual task feels like it’s barely moving.

Every week I talk to my family and initially I struggle to say what I did that week. But then I start remembering and it turns out that while things do move slowly, a lot of things are moving. So here is me (1) complaining about the things I didn’t manage to do, (2) realizing all the things I did do, and (3) concluding that I need to adjust my expectations and all will be alright.

I didn’t write the outline for my final postdoc paper, plan experiments for that postdoc paper, start our new lab’s big EMS screen, finish optimizing tissue culture techniques, characterize or even genotype all the mutant lines I received, or generate any transgenic lines. All of those feel big and like I should have done at least several of them. They each live rent free in my head. But on the other hand, nothing has spectacularly failed (yet) and there is plenty of time.

The things I did do feel smaller even though some are objectively bigger:

– I recruited 2 PhD students and 2 BSc students. While only one of those has started so far, by April 1^st we’ll have 6 people in the lab (including me and Steffi, our lab’s technician). In the process of recruiting, I learned a lot about interviewing and hiring, but also about how our institute and the DFG are organized.

– I decorated my office. It needed some plants and it is a great place to work now.

– I gave talks for BSc students Nanoscience, MSc students Plant Biology, an online symposium (pre-recorded), our entire institute, and the DFG (German Research Foundation). On one hand they were all around the same topic, on the other hand they all had different the time slots (12 – 90 minutes), audience, and effects on my nerves.

– I got a grant! The DFG interview for the Emmy Noether went well and 2 days after I got an informal phone call indicating the committee had recommended my grant for funding. We officially started Feb 1^st. With this grant we can expand our lab with 2 PhD students and a Postdoc and do the expensive experiments I proposed.

– I learned a lot of German. This is maybe more a personal than professional achievement, but I will count it for both. While I don’t have to teach in German and everyone at the ZMBP speaks English I feel that it’ll make my life a lot easier. My speaking is still hesitant, but I can understand most in a one on one conversation.

– Steffi and I set up plasmid and seed stocks from the materials I brought and have started cloning in preparation for the new students joining. The first destination vectors are on their way!

Overall, my distorted feeling of not getting anything done comes from how I used to organize my time and attention during my PhD and postdoc. I had gotten really used to the workflow I had as a postdoc: managing a few projects in parallel but having enough time and flexibility to really push one forward when I want to.

Right now I still spend quite some time in the lab because a) I like it, b) we are still small, c) I have the skills to get stuff done and train people. But because my time is fragmented, things don’t feel like they move very fast. And I don’t think that is going to get a lot better any time soon. While right now every week is different and surprising, soon I will hopefully have more of a routine and things should start to feel more manageable. This is of course all relative…

In addition, I’ll try to change my mindset, instead of regularly feeling down because things seem to move slowly, I should take some time to recognize the progress we’re making. While I never really got into the “Gratitude Journal” lifestyle, maybe parts of that can help me feel more positive. Not that I am overall feeling negative! I just need to re-contextualize and re-set my expectations. Right now, I keep enjoying learning on the job and developing our research. All while making some mistakes but progressing slowly but surely. Fingers crossed!

(5 votes)

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