Like most things in life, research requires funding. This becomes increasingly apparent as researchers progress through their career. At some point, everyone has to jump on the funding treadmill.

For many researchers, the first experience of a grant application process may be applying for postgraduate funding for their masters/PhD. While I never pursued this option myself, as a postdoc, I now see it from the other side of the fence. It is a good opportunity for PIs to employ someone for 3-4 years at no cost…..Read More

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Like needles in a haystack, interesting speakers that bring charisma and rock n’ roll to their talks are hard to come by. No matter what the research interests of the audience, these speakers hypnotize the audience with their funny analogies and the confidence in their data. Leaving the audience inspired to run back to the lab, read more papers, carry on into post-docing or become a PI…. Read more at www.postpostdoc.com/becoming-a-confident-scientific-speaker

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After a life in science, some of those years getting paid, some of those years not, I decided to set up a website to help PhDs and PostDocs with decisions on what to do next with short shorties of people that have or are going through similar experiences. I also hope to help share a few tips and advice for life in the lab and how to make your work day a little easier! If you are interested please have a look at my website

www.postpostdoc.com

If you would like to get in touch and write and article for the site I would love to hear from you!

Good luck, Good Science!

(2 votes)

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You didn’t stop developing once you were born (or hatched).  Our infant selves barely resemble ourselves as adults, thankfully, and stem cells play an important role in this continued development.  A recent paper describes the identification of a stem cell niche that generates the melanophores that are responsible for the color patterning in adult zebrafish.

The color patterns that many animal species rely on for natural and sexual selection are generated by differences in melanin synthesis in melanophores.  During embryonic development, melanophores are derived from the neural crest.  In many species, such as zebrafish, the patterning seen in adults is established well after embryonic development—when the neural crest is no longer present.  A recent paper in Development describes the identification of melanophore stem cells that are inactive in the larval stages of zebrafish development, and later activated in juvenile zebrafish.  Dooley and colleagues found that the dorsal root ganglia serve as niches for these melanophore stem cells.  The melanophore stem cells are established early in embryonic development, and later spread out segmentally to produce the stripes seen on adult zebrafish.  These cells depend on the protein ErB for neural crest migration and the gene kit ligand (kitlga) to function as stem cells.  In the images above, recovering larval melanophores (green, arrowhead) migrate away from the position of the dorsal root ganglion (asterisk), along the spinal nerves, after morpholino knockdown of the transcription factor mitfa successfully depleted the existing larval melanophores.  The blue arrowhead points to a cell that later migrates.  This pattern resembles the proximity of melanophores to spinal nerves seen in wild-type juvenile zebrafish.

For a more general description of this image, see my imaging blog within EuroStemCell, the European stem cell portal.
Dooley, C., Mongera, A., Walderich, B., & Nusslein-Volhard, C. (2013). On the embryonic origin of adult melanophores: the role of ErbB and Kit signalling in establishing melanophore stem cells in zebrafish Development, 140 (5), 1003-1013 DOI: 10.1242/dev.087007

(7 votes)

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Regenerative Medicine: From Biology to Therapy

30 October-1 November 2013

Few topics in contemporary medicine have attracted more attention than stem cells and their potential for enabling the discovery of new regenerative therapies. The aim of this new Wellcome Trust Scientific Conference is to understand the biology that underpins the success or failure of regeneration, and to clarify the relationship between stem cell biology and regenerative biology so that both can be fully exploited to treat disease.

This meeting is aimed at scientists involved in developmental and regenerative biology, stem cell research, translational medicine, or clinical trials.

Scientific programme committee

Peter Coffey, UCSB, USA/ University College London, UK

Charles ffrench-Constant, University of Edinburgh, UK

Robin Franklin, University of Cambridge, UK

Topics will include:

• Regeneration biology: lessons from phylogeny

• Regeneration and therapeutics: the spectrum of regenerative efficiency in mammalian tissues

• Non stem cell-based regenerative biology

• Therapeutic regeneration by (stem) cell transplantation

• Reprogramming and transdifferentiation

• ES/iPS cell technologies

We welcome abstracts from all areas relevant to regenerative biology and regenerative medicine. Several oral presentations will be chosen from the abstracts submitted.

For more information, see: https://registration.hinxton.wellcome.ac.uk/display_info.asp?id=369

(1 votes)

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We are pleased to announce that an EMBO Workshop on Morphogen Gradients will be held in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, UK from 26 – 29th June 2013.

Registration is now open:

http://events.embo.org/13-morphogen/

The goal of this workshop is to bring together biologists, physicists and imaging specialists to discuss how morphogen gradients are generated and interpreted. After 20 years of molecular and genetic studies, the morphogen field has recently begun to use quantitative and biophysical approaches. These studies have led to surprisingly diverse findings and conclusions. For example, different modes of morphogen transport have been proposed and different ways of morphogen interpretation have been suggested.

The workshop aims to discuss the current status of the field and to seek input from other systems to stimulate new directions. Major emphasis will be placed on current debates in the field and the technical and theoretical developments that will address these issues. A broad range of speakers from both biological and physical sciences will ensure that the major systems and approaches in the field are covered.

In addition to the 21 invited speakers, an additional 10 speakers will be chosen from abstracts.

(3 votes)

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I recently came across a study by Milinkovitch and colleagues on the development of crocodile head scales. I think it highlights how nature sometimes chooses unusual ways to approach development, so I thought I would share a short summary here!

Scales, feathers and hairs are evolutionary adaptations to terrestrial life, fulfilling functions such as preventing water loss or protecting from UV radiation. It is unclear whether they are homologous structures or the result of convergent evolution, but all three structures are generated in a similar way. During embryogenesis, individual developmental units are genetically specified, each of them later forming, for example, an individual scale. The final surface organisation of these developmental units is thought to be established following a model first proposed by Turing over 60 years ago. According to this model, the local concentration of several chemical components, and the ability of cells to differentiate at unique thresholds of these components, generates different patterns.

A recent paper by Milinkovitch and colleagues, however, suggests that surface patterns may be determined using a different mechanism. By making 3D models of crocodile heads and mapping scale edges and nodes, the authors noticed how these scale patterns, unlike other reptiles, were not symmetrically organised in individual heads and were generally randomly distributed. Using these models, they analysed several features, such as edge angles and area distribution, concluding that the scales of the crocodile head are generated simply by physical cracking of the skin during development. This was evident during crocodile embryonic development: initially only major cracks are present, and these then branch and interconnect over time to form the final scale complexity.

Crocodile heads choose an alternative to the more common theme of genetic developmental determination of skin patterns, and it will be interesting to see whether a similar mechanism is used by other organisms (or body parts!). This work also shows how physical processes can be major players in certain developmental processes, an important reminder that genes do not always explain everything.

Milinkovitch MC., Manukyan L., Debry A., Di-Poi N., Martin S., Singh D., Lambert D., Zwicker M. (2013). Crocodile head scales are not developmental units but emerge from physical cracking, Science, 339 78-81

(4 votes)

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Did it ever occur to you that to enjoy music from Antonio Vivaldi to Lil Wayne, we use only about 22,000 sensory hair cells in our ears? Because hair cells are mechanosensors translating sounds to neural impulses, their irreversible degeneration causes hearing loss. Unlike amphibians and birds, we as mammals cannot spontaneously regenerate hair cells to restore hearing. This is in part why hearing loss is permanent. In order to identify hair cell progenitors in the postnatal cochlea, we took a pathway-centric approach and used active Wnt signaling (Axin2) as a marker. Much to our surprise, we detected robust Wnt activity in tympanic border cells, a poorly characterized group of cells directly beneath the organ of Corti (the hearing organ).

In this article, we show that Axin2, as a downstream target of the canonical Wnt pathway, marks tympanic border cells. We took advantage of the Cre-Lox recombination system to temporally label Axin2-expressing tympanic border cells in neonatal mice and follow them over the first 2 weeks of postnatal development.  Our data demonstrate that these cells, despite initially lacking epithelial markers, contribute to the sensory epithelium including sensory hair cells.  Using an analogous Axin2-LacZ reporter mouse strain, we isolated tympanic border cells using flow cytometry and found that they were similarly able to acquire epithelial and sensory phenotypes in vitro.  Although their natural ability to become sensory epithelial cells was surprising, stimulating the Wnt signaling pathway increased their ability to proliferate, similarly to observations made on progenitor cells from other organ systems. Interestingly, there is another population of Wnt-responsive cochlear progenitor cells, the recently characterized Lgr5-positive supporting cells, which are distinct from the Axin2-positive tympanic border cells. This study now suggests that the neonatal cochlea and surrounding tissues may provide niches for multiple progenitor cell populations, a model comparable to many developing and self-renewing organs. Unfortunately either the niches or the progenitor cells (or both) are not maintained into adulthood. This begs the questions of how the two progenitor cell populations relate and interact and how stemness is lost in the mature cochlea. For now, hair cell loss remains irreversible, so think twice about sitting in the front row of the next concert you attend because the noise damage you experience will contribute to the decline of your hearing with time.

(5 votes)

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The Company of Biologists is sponsoring the next Cosy Science Meeting.  “Jerky or Smooth: The Evolution of Cancer!”, a talk by David Pellman, will be held on March 13th at 7pm at The Cittie of Yorke pub, London.

There will be plenty of time for discussion, and nibbles and free drinks will be provided for the audience!

We hope to see you there!

(2 votes)

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It was a short month, but a momentous one in the life of the Node: Eva, who set up the site and ran it for the last almost three years, has said goodbye and moved on to new challenges. We’ll need your help to keep things going until her replacement arrives, so please keep posting, commenting and reading!

But there’s been plenty of varied content on the Node this month:

Patricia Gongal is also embarking on a new career, and tested out Science Careers’ “my Individual Development Plan” to see if she’d picked the right job!

Images:
Development is looking for the very best images of stem cells. Submit yours now for a chance to be featured on the cover of Development, or on the upcoming stem cell section of the journal’s website.

This new stem cell competition comes hot on the heels of the most recent round of Woods Hole Embryology Course. This confocal image of an E10.5 day mouse embryo won with over 300 votes.

If you don’t have any images of stem cells for Development’s competition, maybe you have pictures of inanimate objects that look like Xenopus developmental stages. Vicky Hatch set up a Facebook page that features pictures of “Things that look like Xenopus”. They’re everywhere!

Research:
Stephen Frankenberg has been studying early cell lineage specification in the wallaby (a marsupial).

“One of the more interesting findings is that key regulatory factors known from mouse development appear to be uniformly expressed and localised in all cells of the early unilaminar blastocyst, although underlying biases in cell fate could still exist. This raises the possibly that totipotent stem cells could be derived for the first time in any mammal. We plan to explore this and other avenues and hope that our study is just the beginning of a renaissance in marsupial early embryology!”

Jessica Whited works with a completely different animal model. She recently developed a technique for retroviral infection of regenerating axolotl limbs.

“These retroviruses are simply injected into limb tissue, and they can infect any mitotically active cell they encounter. Since the retroviral genomes integrate into host cells, they can be used to permanently express a label such as GFP, which allows for tracking cells during regeneration, opening the door to many future studies.”

Also on the Node:
–Image: Stem cell decisions and the cell cycle
–Breakthrough Prize awards eleven scientists with $3 million each.
–Summary of tweets from the Science Online conference
–Mouse Molecular Genetics conference announcement

(1 votes)

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