A four-year PhD position is available to combine computer modelling with experimental work investigating stem cell specification, activity, and cell migration in the development and maintenance of the vertebrate cornea.

Further details are available here:

http://tinyurl.com/pmxm2cy

The deadline for applications is 16th December.  Please feel free to contact Prof Martin Collinson (m.collinson@abdn.ac.uk) or Dr Silke Henkes (silkehenkes@gmail.com) to discuss the project further.

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What is the earliest Phylum of metazoans to possess what we would recognize as a nervous system?

Did earlier organisms have all the components of a nervous system in the absence of what we would recognize as neurons?

What is a neuron?

Did nervous systems evolve independently more than once?

Where were all the molecular tool boxes that define a nervous system harnessed from?

These and related questions will be discussed in a three-day international meeting to be held in Florida, May 13-15, 2014.

Participants include recognized experts in the phylogeny of lower metazoans, comparative biologists interested in the cell and neurobiology of the same groups, and molecular biologists interested in the evolution of processes and molecules that underlie nerve function.

Contributed papers are invited for both oral and poster sessions.

Travel awards are available for students.

For full details see our website at: http://efns2.whitney.ufl.edu/

(1 votes)

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The 4th Annual UPMC / Curie International Course on Developmental Biology titled “From Stem Cells to Morphogenesis” took place in Paris during a 5-week period in September-October 2013. Participants included both Masters and PhD students coming from all over the world. Students from Brazil, Canada, Greece, Portugal, France, Germany, Spain, England, India, Russia and Italy gathered together to take part in this special course.

The course was comprised of two complementary components. The first part included the practical workshops on the development of different animal models including Drosophila, Mouse oocytes and embryos, Zebrafish, Xenopus, Chick and Nematode. The workshop took place at Université Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC) every day (except Sunday) for three weeks. Professors and Assistant Professors from all over Paris directed us during a series of experiments aimed at exploring the different advantages of the model systems. We also had the opportunity to work together with prominent guest researchers from the Stowers Institute in Kansas and University College London (UCL). Throughout the workshop students were encouraged to ask questions and to discuss with the professors about the different techniques that can be used to study each model system. The high quality of our instructors combined with the availability of modern equipment at each bench and within the university provided appropriate conditions for us to acquire a thorough understanding of every model presented.

The practical workshop was followed by two weeks of scientific talks given by French and International speakers, and there was an option to only participate in this portion of the course. The conference took place at the Institut Curie, which is located in the historic and beautiful Latin Quarter of Paris. Professors and renowned researchers from institutions such as Harvard, Cambridge, the Stowers Institute, UCL, UPMC, Institute Pasteur and Institut Curie presented recent and often unpublished data spanning a variety of interesting topics in developmental biology in different model systems. Subjects ranged from planarian regeneration to Drosophila morphogenesis, and from regulation of cell cycle to embryonic stem cell biology. Each lecture was followed by an active panel discussion. We had the opportunity to ask the speakers, who are experts in their respective fields, questions about their subject and research. In addition, following the talks we had the chance to discuss with the speakers in a more informal way over coffee and biscuits about things like our own research and future careers. All of us would agree that this was a unique and beneficial opportunity.

Furthermore, students had the opportunity to present an article during the course chosen by the guest speaker and then to propose an experimental design for future research. The advantages of this exercise were bidirectional; we were able to present in front of the author of the article which gave us the opportunity to acquire constructive feedback and advance our scientific way of thinking. Likewise, the researchers benefited from the chance to listen to some new ideas and research proposals on their own work from a different perspective.

Overall, this course provided us with an excellent opportunity to broaden our knowledge and understanding of developmental biology in an ideal environment that promoted discussion, critical thinking and learning. We acquired many new theoretical as well as practical skills that will help develop our scientific careers. However the experience was not only academic. On a more personal level, we were exposured to not only to a different educational system, but also to new cultures. Lasting friendships were made between people all over the world. We were able to bond over our shared interests in developmental biology and in this way help to build a future network of young scientists. All in all this was an extremely rewarding experience.

Ioanna & Lauren

(2 votes)

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If you’re interested in how science is done, what it takes to make major discoveries, and how we got to where we are today, you may be interested in a book that’s just been published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. The book’s called Blue Skies and Bench Space: Adventures in Cancer Research, and its proud and slightly-embarrassed-to-be-promoting-it author is me.

Modern biology was in its infancy when the Imperial Cancer Research Fund opened the laboratories in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which still exist today as the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute. Thanks to a succession of visionary Directors, who recruited a collection of fantastic scientists, the new labs rapidly became a byword for the ambitious, cutting edge work that its present occupants are still engaged in. However, half a century on, molecular biology and its offshoots are just part of the collection of weaponry in the multi-disciplinary research armoury we now have at our disposal, and the LRI is moving into a new phase of life, as part of the Francis Crick Institute. Blue Skies and Bench Space was written to ensure that the pioneering work that went on there is not forgotten.

From the start, the book was not intended to be a conventional lab memoir, where much of the interest lies in trying to find pictures of oneself and one’s friends. Rather, it was intended to be readable; a collection of non-fiction, scientific short stories, where the people are as important as the discoveries. So, within its pages you will find the dragons and sharks who occupied the Fifth Floor of the ICRF in the 1970s, and who played a huge part in the eukaryotic molecular biology revolution whilst scrapping merrily amongst themselves; the travails of a very tall postdoc who took a job at the ICRF to fill a spare year, and ended up discovering p53; the many and wonderful doings of Clare Hall; the collision of the growth factor and oncogene fields as masterminded by a fresh-faced young PhD student and his party animal boss; why Paul Nurse is so bad at French and so good at science; the link between Morris Dancing and death; sex, and how to determine it; and finally, and particularly of interest to developmental biologists, how a mix of fish, frogs, and chickens can culminate in hedgehogs.

If you fancy a dip into history, the book is available from its publishers, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, or on Amazon. All royalties from book sales will go to Cancer Research UK. Additionally, Blue Skies and Bench Space is free to read online, where you’ll also find an accompanying blog, with some of the background material and photos that wouldn’t fit into the book itself. I hope very much that you’ll take a look; there’ll be something there that you’ll enjoy, I think.

*************

Kathy Weston used to be a proper scientist but is now a science writer and communicator. See Falling Off the Ladder: How Not to Succeed in Academia for an account of how this happened.

Image 1- Cover art courtesy of Joe Brock, NIMR PhotoGraphics

Image 2- Paul Nurse off for a game of footy in the 1980s

(1 votes)

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The Node will temporarily shutdown tomorrow, Friday the 29th of November, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. (GMT). We hope to be up and running soon after!

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Research, write grants, publish papers, teach, manage staff, collaborate. And now engage the public?!

Most scientists have their hands full, and while public engagement sounds nice in the abstract, actually finding time to do it well can be a challenge. This is the beauty of citizen science: it’s not just outreach, it let’s you get data you couldn’t get any other way. Citizens are asked to help solve a real scientific problem, so researchers get data to advance their work and members of the public get to experience an aspect of current science. It can be a powerful form of outreach because it highlights the sometimes tedious and often addictive search for new knowledge that characterises real science.

My experience with citizen science started last year when the Medical Research Council solicited ideas for public engagement activities to be associated with the celebration of the MRC Centenary in 2013.

At the time, I was a postdoc in Bill Schafer’s lab at the MRC Lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge working on automated methods for analysing the behaviour of the nematode worm C. elegans. It was important that the analysis was automated because we had the equivalent of a four-month worm movie that had been collected over the previous couple of years using eight tracking microscopes (the movie has a cast of about 12 000 worms from over 300 mutant strains). When it came to analysing worm postures and locomotion, we were doing pretty well, but there are other behaviours that are more challenging to train computers to see. Here’s a close-up view recorded by Robyn Branicky:
 
 

 
Studying the genetics of egg laying in worms has shed light on a whole host of conserved pathways and we wanted to find more. There we were, with hours and hours of videos of worms doing their thing, including laying eggs, but it was just too much for one person to go through it all manually. Fortunately, even in our tracking videos, the only training you need to identify egg laying events is to watch a couple of examples. When the MRC asked for outreach project ideas, we figured we had a perfect match.
 
The result was Worm Watch Lab.
 
From the start we were working with the fine folks at Zooniverse on the project. This was an excellent experience and I can’t emphasise enough what a difference it makes to work with professionals who really know how to do citizen science. If we had tried to do this ourselves, even if we had hired professional developers to help with the site, there’s no way it would have gone as smoothly or resulted in such a nice finished product.

In addition to the basic function of watching videos and identifying egg laying events, it’s also possible for worm watchers to tag and comment on videos if they have a question or find something interesting. You can see the latest examples at http://talk.wormwatchlab.org/. This has let us see which aspects of the task people find challenging but it’s also been an opportunity for me to see things I assumed were in the data set but had never actually seen, like uncoordinated worms sitting in a huge pile of eggs or videos with larval worms that had already hatched (#tinyworms and #baby are popular tags).

Worm Watchers have classified an impressive 115 000 short video clips so far, but there’s still a lot more work to do (I estimate we’ll need to do about 1 million classifications to complete the task, but I can’t be more precise because we don’t yet know how many times each video needs to be viewed to ensure accurate classification).

If you want to see how citizen science can work in biology or if you’re just in the mood to watch some worm TV, please give us a hand (or at least a few mouse clicks!) and feel free to ask any questions on the talk page: http://talk.wormwatchlab.org/.
 
 
Andre Brown is a group leader at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London.
 

This post is part of a series on science outreach. You can read the introduction to the series here and read other posts in this series here.

(3 votes)

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A post is available on a BBSRC funded project to examine the functional role of Nanog and downstream target genes during primordial germ cell (PGC) development. We have shown that Nanog-null PGCs do not develop fully and this post will determine the residues within Nanog that mediate function, test the possibility that the Nanog target gene Esrrb can rescue Nanog-null PGC function and explore the PGC-specific role of other Nanog targets. Post holder will have (or shortly obtain) a Ph.D. in Development or Stem Cell Biology and a keen interest in understanding how cell identity is controlled. You should be familiar with gene targeting, techniques for high throughput RNA analysis and be able to perform immunofluorescence and QPCR. An ability to culture EpiSCs, potentially differentiating cells to PGC-like cells is desirable, as is the ability to isolate in vivo PGCs. Post is full-time and fixed term for up to 36 months.

 £30,424 – £36,298 pa

Vacancy ref: 022449

Deadline for applications is Monday 16th December 2013

A full job description and details of how to apply can be found on The University of Edinburgh website at: https://www.vacancies.ed.ac.uk

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Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology
http://www.ibmb.csic.es/index.php?pg=laboratorio&idLaboratorio=18&tab=lab_home

We are looking for: Enthusiastic researchers with a BSc or Master Degree in biomedical sciences with interest in Developmental Neurobiology. Good academic records are required. Good spoken and written command of English

We offer: A highly multidisciplinary and competitive training programme in biomedical research. Access to state-of-the-art infrastructures.

The selected candidate will investigate the role of extracellular signals and the genetic networks that control cell numbers, cell identity and cell shape changes during the embryonic development of the neural tube, using live-imaging, cell- and molecular biology in two animal model chick and zebrafish embryos

Those interested please send CV, a cover letter justifying the interest of the applicant in the project to emgbmc@ibmb.csic.es

Application deadline on December 10th, 2013  

(1 votes)

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Memory impairment and age-related “brain decline” is a topic to which anyone relates to, a topic of great interest for both the scientific community and our aging population. So, imagine my curiosity and excitement when I came across this title: “Loss of dickkopf-1 restores neurogenesis in old age and counteracts cognitive decline”…luckily the paper also contained a pretty picture!

Neurogenesis is the process by which new neurons are formed from neural stem cells. Neural stem cells give rise to progenitors that proliferate before giving rise to newborn neurons. Understanding molecular mechanisms involved in this process is very important since it could help us understand how our brains age but also how things go wrong in complex neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

In a recent study published in Cell Stem Cell, Seib and colleagues used genetic engineering in order to induce the loss of the protein dickkopf-1 (dkk1) specifically in neural progenitors in the adult mouse brain. They show that when Dkk1 is “switched off” in neural progenitors, there is an increased production of immature neurons, which then produce mature neurons with more complex morphology.

In the left panel of this picture, one can observe newborn neurons (marked by the protein doublecortin DCX in red) from a regular old mouse brain. On the right are newborn neurons from an old mouse brain in which Dkk1 has been switched-off in neural progenitors. Since they can see more dendrites (the branched connections of a neuron that conduct electrical signals) on the right panel, the authors conclude that the loss of Dkk1 leads to the production of neurons with more complex morphology.

They also show that the loss of Dkk1 in old mice is correlated with an increase in spatial memory and a better affective behavior! Even better, the spatial working memory and the memory consolidation is back to similar levels as young animals!

Unfortunately, switching off Dkk1 to “restore neurogenesis and counteract cognitive decline” is far from being applicable to humans. However, studies like these build our understanding on how our brains work…and the more we understand the better we will get at curing complex diseases.

Picture credit:

Seib, D. R., Corsini, N. S., Ellwanger, K., Plaas, C., Mateos, A., Pitzer, C., Niehrs, C., Celikel, T. and Martin-Villalba, A. (2013) ‘Loss of Dickkopf-1 restores neurogenesis in old age and counteracts cognitive decline’, Cell Stem Cell 12(2): 204-14. doi: 10.1016/j.stem.2012.11.010.

(3 votes)

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