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.

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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

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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.

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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  

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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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The first joint meeting of the French Society for Developmental Biology and the French Society of Genetics took place close to Avignon, in Isle sur la Sorgue, between the 12th and the 15th of November. This small meeting was a great chance to hear about the interesting developmental biology going on in France, and to talk with the scientists in the French community. The conference venue- a nice holiday resort away from the centre of Avignon- was ideal for this, encouraging people to stay in the venue and interact during the breaks.

Joint meetings are very interesting, as they highlight the overlap and synergy between fields. The connections between developmental biology and genetics were highlighted, for example, in the first opening lecture, by Patrick Lemaire (CRBM, Montpellier). His lab is attempting to understand how different ascidian species can have very similar morphologies and developmental stages while diverging in genome sequence, by comparing genome architecture and regulatory sequences across species.

The next 2 days of the conference were divided into different sessions. It is not possible to summarise all the talks, so I will highlight only a few. The first session was on the epigenetics of development. One of the highlights in this session was the talk by Olivier Voinnet (ETH Zurich) who considered how plants are able to silence transposons by analyzing the behavior of the reactivated transposon Évadé. He showed how Évadé is perceived as an RNA virus by the plant, but is able to evade silencing until a threshold of the virus RNA is reached, leading to promoter methylation and silencing. The second session of the conference was on germ cells, meiosis and early developmental decisions. In this session, Jean René Huynh (Institute Curie) explored how chromosome pairing takes place in meiosis in Drosophila, while Marine Poulain (INSERM CEA) presented her work investigating the role of DMRTA2 in the female ovaries using xenografts of human fetal ovaries in mice.

The second full day of the conference kicked off with a session on genome dynamics and evolution. In this session Jean Deutsch (UPMC CNRS) used his slot for a philosophical discussion of why we must revisit the traditional definition of ‘gene’ in light of the discoveries in the last few decades. Jean has written an article about this topic for the French edition of Scientific American, which you can read here [in French]. Also in this session, Guillaume Balavoine (Institut Jacques Monod) introduced the marine annelid Platynereis as an interesting model system in which to study segmentation, while Nicolas Gompel (LMU Munich) explored the genetics behind the emergence and diversification of wing patterns in Drosophila.  In the Signalling and Gene network sessions, Corinne Houart (King’s College London) presented her group’s work.on the signaling centres involved in regulating the size and complexity of the forebrain. Also in this session Pierre Leopold (IBV Nice) considered how organ growth and developmental timings are coordinated in Drosophila.

The last day of the conference started with a talk by Emmanuelle Szenker, the winner of the French Society for Developmental Biology PhD Thesis Award, who examined the roles of histone variants H3.2 and H3.3 during frog development during her PhD.

The conference concluded in style with 3 great talks in a session dedicated to new approaches and challenges in development and genetics. Frank Schnorrer (MPI Munich) presented work from his lab investigating how flight muscle morphogenesis takes place, using a combination of techniques, including beautiful microscopy, RNAi and microarrays. He also introduced his current collaborative project to generate a comprehensive, genome-wise library of tagged Drosophila proteins within their native genomic context. Eileen Furlong (EMBL Heidelberg) described how her lab is assessing the 3D organization of enhancers in the genome, and how these physical connections change during development. The conference concluded with an excellent talk by Feng Zhang (MIT). Feng first described the development and applications of CRISPR technology. He then moved on to present a new method to control epigenetic states by combining optogenetics technology with the microbial effector proteins TALEs.
 
It was great to attend this meeting and to be able to get a taste of the great science going on in France. We hope to have spread the word about the Node a little bit more, and hopefully have a greater participation of the French community on the Node in the future!

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What is a science exhibition?

These are publicly accessible exhibitions that hold stalls designed to communicate specific areas of science to a lay audience. They tend to vary in terms of their content and the groups of people they are intended to engage with but will usually involve a series of organised events and stalls that communicate specific areas of science. One of the most widely known and well attended of these exhibitions is the The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. This is a week-long event with scientists from across the UK showing off some amazing work from all fields of science at the Royal Society in London. My personal highlights from this year were learning that a t-rex had feathers, that I’m not smarter than a zebra fish and just what on earth the Higgs boson actually is.

We were lucky enough to be granted the opportunity to show some of our work at this year’s exhibition and our stall was:

http://sse.royalsociety.org/2013/exhibits/biology-builders/

These types of exhibitions are designed to be fun, interactive and educational, demonstrating the amazing range and quality of science being performed in the UK. It is not only the physical stalls themselves that the public come to see but you, the person actually doing the work. Putting a face to the science is the best way to showcase it and the interactions that you have with the public can be some of the most rewarding you will ever have in your carrier.

Why are these events important?

First and foremost these events are about feeding back to the people who fund your work, the general public. The majority of the work we do as academic scientists is funded from public money in the form of taxation or donation and as the financiers these people have the right to know what their money is being spent on; and science exhibitions are designed to do just that. Communicating science to the general public is also becoming increasingly important to funding bodies and many are beginning to require public engagement strategies to be written into grant applications.

The personal experience of doing these events is highly rewarding and all members of our stall team thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Speaking with the public can give you a fresh perspective on what you do as well as reinforce to you as a person how important and valuable your work really is. We even had staff and students fighting over shifts so they could spend as much time on the stall as possible.

Some of the most valuable interactions we experienced involved young people and school groups. These young adults showed an incredible level of knowledge and enthusiasm not only for the science we discussed but us as scientists. This event provided an amazing opportunity to educate and inspire the next generation of scientist, breaking down the stereotypes of who scientists really are and what we do.

Getting started

The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is one of the biggest and most prestigious science outreach events in the UK and so when we first began to plan our stall we realised how important it would be to get experience with these types of events. We therefore decided to show a very simple stall at our Universities annual public outreach day called Mayfest. The experiences we gathered from this provided invaluable feedback on the basic design of our stall at the Royal Society and enabled us to try out a variety of different interactive elements to all age groups.

Even if you intend to only hold a small stall at such a local event it is always worth gaining some practical experience in speaking to the general public about your science before you hold your stall. Most organisations have some form of public outreach experience and it is worth seeking out those who run these activates within your institution. The best advice would of course be from someone who has run a stall of this kind but any advice or guidance they can offer would be invaluable.

There are many different aspects to running a stall of this kind ranging from design and construction to safeguarding vulnerable people during interactions with the public. Form an enthusiastic and hardworking team of people who work well together and most importantly plan meticulously. We were lucky enough to have a healthy budget for our exhibition stand but you can run a stall with almost any budget – you will amazed what you can beg and steal – but you can also seek funding from external sources.
 
 
Here are some links to UK based grant opportunities:

    Welcome Trust: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/Public-engagement/index.htm

    EPSRC and BBSRC: No longer have separate calls as they now require engagement within existing grant calls so speak to PI’s within your organisation about how a stall could satisfy their grant stipulations. They may be persuaded to part with some cash as a result.

    Science and Technology Facilities Council: http://www.stfc.ac.uk/1780.aspx

    Society for Applied Microbiology: http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/grants–awards/public-engagement-grant.cfm

    The Physiological Society: http://www.physoc.org/public-engagement-grants

    Institute of Physics: http://www.iop.org/about/grants/outreach/page_38843.html

    British Society for Plant Pathology: http://www.bspp.org.uk/funds/promotion.php

    British Ecological Society: http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/grants-awards/outreach-grants/

    Biochemical Society: http://www.biochemistry.org/Grants/EducationalGrants/ScientificOutreachGrants.aspx

Designing and building the stall for your audience

When we sat down and began to decide what the stall would be like the central questions we asked ourselves were; ‘what message are we trying to convey’ and ‘who are we delivering this message too’. The Royal Society exhibition covers all age ranges, from parents with very young children through to informed retired professionals visiting for the day and guided school groups. In terms of our message we had quite a complicated idea that would use three current technologies to demonstrate biological complexity during early development and how this could be rebuilt in a laboratory for future clinical therapies. You could have designed an entire stall around each of these but we decided to simplify and link them into a cohesive and exciting experience for the visitor.
 

Our stall ultimately consisted of a 3D printer in the central podium that produced large scale biological structures, allowing visitors to see the machine in action and interact with the printed objects. The podium to the left of the printer consisted of a microscope that allowed the visualisation of stem cells patterned using protein stencil technology. The third and final podium showed a live link to our laboratory in Nottingham allowing member of the public to position live stem cells using an optical tweezer system with the click of a mouse.

Once we knew who we were pitching at and the message we wanted to convey the next question was ‘how do we design the stall to deliver this message to all age ranges’. This was a real challenge particularly as the work we were trying to show covered everything from the physics of lasers to what a stem cell is. We rapidly realised that you cannot cover everything and that it may be necessary to sacrifice detail so that all visitors can have a fun and interesting experience whilst leaning something new about our science. Consequently the basic design was very simple with three podiums displaying the three technologies we were displaying with more detailed, simpler interactive objects to hand so that we could adapt to all age ranges and leaning abilities depending on need.

Would we recommend running a stall?

Absolutely! When we started this process we had never run a stall of this kind and the majority of the people who ultimately staffed the stall had never done any form of public engagement. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the experience and if we can do it anyone can, so we would absolutely encourage all scientists to participate in science exhibitions.

 
 
Also read Glen’s outreach activity suggestion- Using modified ping-pong balls to demonstrate early embryogenesis and embryonic stem cell activity
 

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.

(1 votes)

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Why is this a good activity?

It is often difficult to communicate how the organization of individual cells can affect later function, particularly with regard to early embryogenesis and the organization of embryonic stem cells. This activity allows a simple way of visualizing these processes to all age groups from any educational background. The activity is also fully interactive and is relatively inexpensive.

 Which age group is this activity aimed at:

Any age group but is particularly useful for younger audiences.

Materials needed:

Ping-pong balls of at least two different colors and adhesive Velcro spots both hooks and loops.

Step-by-step instructions:

Take a ping pong ball and stick 4 adhesive Velcro hook spots on opposing sides, around the circumference. Then stick 2 adhesive loop spots on the remaining, opposing sides. On a new pin-pong ball do the same but use 4 x loops and 2 hooks. Repeat this process as many times as desired so that there are an equal number of each type of ball. You can also mix in different colored balls to represent cells at differing stages of development.

You can use these to illustrate how individual cells are organized in early embryonic structures by allowing your audience to build a 4 or 8 cell structure themselves as you explain the concepts. These aids are also useful when explaining embryonic stem cell aggregate structures and also how at different stages of development groups of differing cells can be organized into specific locations (colored ping-pong balls).
 
 

Tips

You can use these as a visual aid to describe principles to older audiences and give them to younger children to both entertain but also convey basic principles such as cell adhesion and cell organization. Make a lot of these as they tend to go missing.

 
 
Also read Glen’s post about the Biology Builders stand at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, a great case study for science outreach at science festivals.
 

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.

(2 votes)

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Usain Bolt may be the fastest man alive, but which is the fastest cell? Since 2011 that the World Cell Race has been trying to answer this question. The motivation behind the competition is not only to find the fastest cell, but also to understand and discuss cell mobility. Cell movement is very important during development and the normal functioning of the organisms, but it can have very dramatic consequences when it goes astray, such as during metastasis in cancer.

Speed is not everything in this competition. The cells will need not only to be the fastest, but they also need to be ‘smartest’, as they will race through micro-fabricated mazes. Several labs around the world have submitted their best cell lines, and the overall winner will receive a 400 euros prize.

This year’s race is happening today (22nd of November) at 6pm GMT (1pm EST). The Race is taking place in Boston, at the BioMEMS Resource Center, and has been organized in collaboration between groups at Massachusetts General Hospital and Institute Curie in Paris. You can follow all the action on the World Cell Race website.

Let the fastest (and smartest) cell win! And if you enjoy this year’s competition, why not consider sending your fastest cells to participate in next year’s World Cell Race?

(3 votes)

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