The myIDP (Individual Development Plan)  is career aptitude test and career planning site for scientists developed by Science Careers. I recently changed careers, starting my own scientific writing company after a postdoc in developmental biology, so I was interested to see how the software worked.

The first thing you do is go through a few stages of self-assessment. First, you judge your skills in different aspects of science (ex. writing for other scientists, establishing collaborations, mentoring others). The site gives you a list of skills and abilities, and you have to enter where you are on a 1-5 scale from “highly proficient” to “highly deficient”. The software reminds you often that you’re supposed to use the full range of scores, so you have to put aside your ego and rate yourself as “highly deficient” for at least a few key skills!

Second, you rate how often you would like to do certain tasks in your future career (ex. developing and optimizing techniques, negotiating with others, working on committees).

Last, you assess your values as they relate to your career (ex. is it important to you to help advance society, use your strengths frequently in your work, have a good work/life balance). These ratings aren’t used in the career match calculation, but it’s a useful list for self-reflection just the same.

At the end of the assessment, the software tells you the percentage match between your skills and interests and different categories of scientific careers. For me, I was happy to see Science Writing come in at number two, but I was bit surprised to see Sales and Marketing at number four (a field in which I have little interest− or skills for that matter!). Having just started my own business, I was a bit dismayed to see Entrepreneurship was near the bottom!

The output of the career matching function:

The site also includes some journaling-type functions. There are places to add notes about career contacts you’ve met, list your personal career goals and map out how you plan to get there. You can set all kinds of different goals and track your progress, such as for improving some of the skills from their checklist, setting milestones to advance your career, or establishing other career-related project goals, like teaching a class or writing a paper.

At the end you can print out everything you’ve entered, all the self-assessment and goals, as a “personal development plan”.

What I found more useful than the goal-setting and career-matching functions was simply the list of diverse scientific careers, many of which I’d never thought about before. The site has a resources section for each career category that gives links to further reading. For science writing and editing, this collection of links and articles hidden on the Science Careers website was really useful.

(4 votes)

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Eleven biologists received some unbelievable news this week: They will each receive 3 MILLION dollars from a newly established award. The Breakthrough Prize was founded by Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) , Sergey Brin (Google) and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, with the goal of supporting research into life extension and curing diseases.

Among the eleven winners are stem cell researchers Hans Clevers and Shinya Yamanaka. Other winners are Cori Bargmann, David Botstein, Lewis Cantley, Titia de Lange, Napoleone Ferrara, Eric Lander, Charles Sawyers, Bert Vogelstein and Robert Weinberg,

The Guardian interviewed several of the winners, and they’re all just floored by the ridiculous amount of money. Almost literally floored, even. “I almost fell over”, said Lewis Cantley, and Cori Bargmann “had to sit down on the floor for a while”.

While it’s great that there is a new source of funding for biomedical research, and these are definitely very worthy winners, I question the scale of the awards. I think it shows the level of disconnect between Silicon Valley and biology researchers: To the foundation, 3 million dollars per person appears to be a normal award amount, but I bet all eleven winners would have been just as happy, and far less shocked and confused, with even 10% of the money – which would be closer to the sort of amounts they’re used to receiving after a lot of hard work and grant-writing.

Breakthrough scientific research doesn’t come from just a handful of scientists who have already made a name for themselves, but from collaborations between many researchers. While I’m thrilled that the tech community has shown a real interest in the life sciences, I would have liked to see slightly smaller individual prizes, and maybe some money made available by the standard process of application and review to emerging labs, researchers, and initiatives. Preserving a broad network of researchers may in the long run be more rewarding than only awarding the top talent.

The winners seem to be allowed to spend the money any way they want to, though, and I’m excited to see what they come up with. I have some confidence that they will do their best to spread the wealth. Hans Clevers already mentioned plans to use some of his prize money to host a symposium for 150 invited collaborators in Amsterdam, which is something we definitely hope to hear more about.

(Image credit: Juan Barahona on Flickr.)

(4 votes)

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In a journal like Development, full of beautiful immunofluorescence images of developing tissues and organisms, it’s quite rare that a picture of stem cells stands out from an aesthetic point of view. Cells growing in a dish just aren’t quite as pretty as multicolour embryos or organs. At least, that’s the impression that we get when looking through the images submitted to the journal as potential cover pictures. But Erin’s posts here on the Node have shown us that pictures of stem cells can be both beautiful and informative, and now we want to give you the chance to prove that a stem cell can be just as eye-catching as a developing pancreas or fly eye.

Do you have a picture of stem cells (either growing in culture, or in their native environment) that you’re particularly proud of? If so, we want to hear from you! Email your picture to thenode@biologists.com before March 13^th to be in with a chance of winning our image competition. Shortlisted images will be posted on the Node for a public vote, and the winner will grace the cover of a future issue of Development, and will be featured on the stem cell pages we’re currently developing for the journal’s website.

For more information, see our competition rules and our terms and conditions

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We are pleased to announce that the 26th annual Mouse Molecular Genetics meeting will be held at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, from 18 to 21 September 2013. This meeting is a leading forum for researchers who apply genetics and genomics techniques to address fundamental issues in mammalian biology, including stem cell biology, development, epigenetics and models of human disease. The meeting invites leaders in these areas to present unpublished research findings, encourages junior investigators to participate in oral and poster presentations and provides a stimulating environment for the exchange of ideas. The programme will showcase the latest technical developments in genetics and engineering of the mouse genome and this year will also feature a new session devoted to cancer.

Topics will include:
Organogenesis
Technology
Stem cells and germ cells
Patterning
Genetics and genomics
Human disease
Epigenetics
Cancer

Scientific programme committee
Allan Bradley Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK
Kat Hadjantonakis Sloan-Kettering Institute, USA
Yumiko Saga National Institute of Genetics, Japan
Philippe Soriano Mount Sinai School of Medicine, USA

We welcome abstracts from areas relevant to mammalian molecular genetics. Several oral presentations will be chosen from the abstracts submitted

Conference website: https://registration.hinxton.wellcome.ac.uk/display_info.asp?id=372

Further information and a list of invited speakers will be available shortly. To register your interest in this meeting, please contact Wellcome Trust Scientific Conferences.

Conference organiser contact details:
Emily Rees
E-mail: emily.rees@wtgc.org

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We have a winner! This colourful image quickly took the lead, and stayed there. It will appear on the cover of Development soon.

This confocal image (extended focus Z stack) of an E10.5 day mouse embryo was taken by Joyce Pieretti (University of Chicago), Manuela Truebano (Plymouth University), Saori Tani (Kobe University) and Daniela Di Bella (Fundacion Instituto Leloir) Congratulations!

The runners-up were an image of a chick ectopic limb, taken by Elsie Place (MRC National Institute of Medical Research); a widefield microscopy image of a mouse embryo by Eduardo Zattara (University of Maryland, College Park)
and an image of Xenopus embryo epidermis by Andrew Mathewson (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center).

We have some other exciting image news coming up. Stay tuned!

(2 votes)

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Have you ever thought to yourself ‘Hey, that inanimate object looks just like a xenopus!’ No? Well maybe after reading this you will. I started a PhD in a Xenopus lab in 2010 and ever since I’ve been seeing Xenopus everywhere. So much so that I decided to set up a facebook page called ‘Things that look like Xenopus’. You can check it out by following the link below or simply by searching for things that look like Xenopus in the facebook search bar.

http://www.facebook.com/ThingsThatLookLikeXenopus

I set the facebook page up around 4 months ago and since then it has had people from round the world ‘like’ it and I have even had a few people send in their own pictures. I’m now trying to boost awareness of the page and fully encourage people to post their own pictures. Some examples can be seen posted here. The sycamore seed was my first picture and still my favourite. Hopefully you can see how it resembles a tailbud stage embryo. Another one of my favourites is this seed sent in by Nicole Ward. It looks just like a neurula stage embryo on its side.

I hope from this you get the idea and will check out the page.

Happy hunting!

(7 votes)

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Dear developmental biologists and neurobiologists,

I’d like to give you some information on the UCL-Tohoku University joint Symposium from 21st to 22nd Feburary. If you are interested in research fields from cell/developmental biology to Neuroscience, you are free to join it.

(3 votes)

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A lot of things cycle in life, even down to the cellular level.  In the developing central nervous system, regulators of the cell cycle play important roles in maintaining the balance between stem cell self-renewal and differentiation.  A recent paper in the journal Development describes a cell cycle regulator in stem and progenitor cells in the nervous system.

The developing central nervous system depends on the divisions of neural stem cells (NSCs) and intermediate neural progenitor cells (NPCs).  In early development, NSCs continuously self-renew in the ventricular zones of the early neuroectoderm.  After neuroectoderm specification, NSCs give rise to NPCs, which divide and differentiate into many different types of neurons.  Proteins that regulate the progression through different phases of the cell cycle have been shown to regulate NSC and NPC divisions, specifically affecting the balance between proliferative and neurogenic cell divisions.  A recent paper in the journal Development identified the role of a zinc-finger transcription factor specificity protein 2 (Sp2) in regulating cell cycle progression in NSCs and NPCs.  Liang and colleagues found Sp2 expression in NSCs and NPCs in the embryonic and postnatal CNS.  Conditional Sp2-null mice had mitosis-arrested NSCs and NPCs in vivo.  In addition, conditional deletion of Sp2 caused a decrease in the number of NPCs and neurons in developing and postnatal brains, as seen in the images above.  Compared with normal cerebral cortex tissue in the early mouse embryo (E12.5), Sp2-deleted tissue (bottom) had a reduced number of postmitotic neurons (purple, arrows, left column).  NSCs (green, left column) occupied the entire thickness of the Sp2-null cerebral cortex, whereas NSCs occupy only the ventricular zone (VZ) in control tissue.  In addition, NPCs (green, right column) were less dense in Sp2-null tissue a bit later in development (E14.5), compared with control cerebral cortex.

For a more general description of this image, see my imaging blog within EuroStemCell, the European stem cell portal.

Liang, H., Xiao, G., Yin, H., Hippenmeyer, S., Horowitz, J., & Ghashghaei, H. (2013). Neural development is dependent on the function of specificity protein 2 in cell cycle progression Development, 140 (3), 552-561 DOI: 10.1242/dev.085621

(1 votes)

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Marsupials were popular models for early development in the early 1900s , with classic morphological studies performed by notable embryologists such as J.P. Hill, C.G. Hartman, T.T. Flynn (Errol Flynn’s father) and E. McCrady. These workers were fascinated by the marsupial mode of blastocyst formation, which contrasts starkly with that of eutherians. One key difference is that marsupial zygotes contain large amounts of deutoplasm (often called yolk, but probably with a minimal nutritive role), which is expelled into the extracellular space during cleavage. Consequently, the marsupial conceptus never forms a morula and early blastomeres instead adhere to the inner surface of the zona pellucida where they form a single-cell-layered (unilaminar) epithelium. The resulting blastocyst thus lacks an inner cell mass and the embryonic disc develops much later from cells within a restricted region of the epithelium. Marsupial early development thus retains features that are reminiscent of their much yolkier ancestors but on a smaller scale. They can help us to understand how eutherian early development evolved by elucidating homologies in morphological mechanisms and cell lineages among vertebrates.

Now that three marsupial genomes (wallaby, opossum and Tasmanian devil) have been sequenced, new doors are opening for exploring these homologies. In our first detailed molecular analysis of marsupial early cell lineage specification, 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!

(3 votes)

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Here are the research highlights from the current issue of Development:

Evolution of mesoderm induction

Fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) are essential for mesoderm induction in vertebrates and for early mesoderm formation in invertebrate chordates. However, functional studies to date do not support a role for FGF signalling in mesoderm induction in other deuterostomes (animals in which the first embryonic opening forms the anus), such as sea urchins. Thus, the ancestral role of FGF signalling during mesoderm specification in deuterostomes is unclear. On p. 1024, Christopher Lowe and co-workers examine the role of FGF signalling during the early development of the hemichordate Saccoglossus kowalevskii. The researchers report that the FGF ligand fgf8/17/18 is expressed in the ectoderm overlying sites of mesoderm specification within this marine worm’s archenteron (primitive gut) endomesoderm. Mesoderm induction, they show, requires contact between the ectoderm and the endomesoderm. Moreover, loss-of-function experiments indicate that FGF ligand and receptor are both necessary for mesoderm specification. These and other results indicate that FGF signalling is required throughout mesoderm specification in hemichordates and support an ancestral role for FGF signalling in mesoderm formation in deuterostomes.

Histone demethylase builds testis niche

In adult stem cell niches, crosstalk between extrinsic cues (such as signals from neighbouring cells) and intrinsic cues (such as chromatin structure) regulates stem cell identity and activity. Now, on p. 1014, Xin Chen and colleagues report that the histone demethylase dUTX regulates crosstalk among the germline stem cells (GSCs), hub cells and cyst stem cells (CySCs) of the Drosophila testis niche. The researchers show that dUTX acts in CySCs to maintain hub cell identity by activating transcription of the Socs36E gene (which encodes an inhibitor of the JAK-STAT signalling pathway that is required for GSC identity and activity) via removal of a repressive histone modification near its transcription start site. dUTX also acts in GSCs, they report, to maintain hub structure through regulation of DE-cadherin, the Drosophila homologue of vertebrate cadherins. These results show how an epigenetic factor regulates crosstalk among different cell types within an adult stem cell niche and provide important information about the in vivo function of a histone demethylase.

Novel Wnt inhibitors identified

Members of the Eaf gene family are involved in tumour suppression and in embryogenesis but what are the molecular mechanisms that underlie these activities? Here (p. 1067), Wuhan Xiao and colleagues report that eaf1 and eaf2 modulate mesodermal and neural patterning in zebrafish embryos through inhibition of canonical Wnt/β-catenin signalling. They show that ectopic expression of eaf1 and eaf2 in zebrafish embryos and in cultured cells blocks β-catenin reporter activity. Furthermore, they show that Eaf1 and Eaf2 bind to the Armadillo repeat region and C-terminus of β-catenin, and to other β-catenin transcription complex proteins. Both the N- and C-terminus of Eaf1 and Eaf2 must be intact for their suppressive activity, they report. Finally, they show that the biological activities of Eaf family proteins are conserved across species. Together, these results identify a novel role for Eaf1 and Eaf2 in the inhibition of canonical Wnt/β-catenin signalling that might provide the mechanistic basis for the tumour suppressor activity of Eaf family proteins.

Linking planar polarity to junctional remodelling

During morphogenesis, the elongation of polarised tissues involves cells within epithelial sheets and tubes making and breaking intercellular contacts in an oriented manner. How cells remodel their junctional contacts is poorly understood but growing evidence suggests that localised endocytic trafficking of E-cadherin might modulate cell adhesion. Now, Samantha Warrington and co-workers (p. 1045) report that the Frizzled-dependent core planar polarity pathway, which has been implicated in the regulation of cell adhesion through E-cadherin trafficking, promotes polarised cell rearrangements in Drosophila. The researchers report that the core planar polarity pathway promotes cell intercalation during tracheal tube morphogenesis by promoting E-cadherin turnover at junctions through local recruitment and regulation of the guanine exchange factor RhoGEF2. Core planar polarity pathway activity also leads to planar-polarised recruitment of RhoGEF2 and E-cadherin in the epidermis of the embryonic germband and the pupal wing. Thus, the researchers suggest, local promotion of E-cadherin endocytosis through recruitment of RhoGEF2 is a general mechanism by which the core planar polarity pathway promotes polarised cell rearrangements.

Signals for melanocyte stem cells

Adult stem cells are crucial for the growth, homeostasis and regeneration of adult tissues. Melanocyte (melanophore) stem cells (MSCs), which give rise to pigment cells in vertebrates, are an attractive model for studying the regulation of adult stem cells. In this issue, two papers provide new information about the involvement of signalling by the receptor tyrosine kinases Kit and ErbB in the establishment of MSCs in zebrafish.

On p. 1003, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and colleagues investigate the embryonic origin of the melanophores that emerge during juvenile development and that contribute to the striking colour patterns of adult zebrafish. The researchers identify a small set of melanophore progenitors (MPs) that are established early in embryonic development and that are associated with the segmentally reiterated dorsal root ganglia in the fish. They use lineage analysis and four-dimensional in vivo imaging to show that the progeny of these embryonic MPs spread segmentally and give rise to the melanophores that create the adult melanophore stripes. Other experiments indicate that the MPs require zebrafish kit ligand a (kitlga, also known as slk) to function as MSCs, and that MP establishment depends on ErbB signalling during early embryonic development. Based on their results, the researchers propose that dorsal root ganglia provide a niche for MSCs and suggest that Kit signalling might attract and maintain MSCs in this niche.

On p. 996, Thomas O’Reilly-Pol and Stephen Johnson use clonal analysis to investigate which stages of melanocyte regeneration – establishment of MSCs, recruitment of MSCs to produce committed daughter cells, or the proliferation, differentiation and survival of these daughter cells – are affected by Kit signalling deficits; previous work had shown that a reduction in Kit signalling results in dose-dependent reductions of melanocytes during larval regeneration. The researchers show that the reduction in melanocytes in kita mutants is due to a defect in MSC establishment. By contrast, the other stages of melanocyte regeneration are unaffected. Additional analyses indicate that the MSC establishment defect in kita mutants arises from inappropriate differentiation of the MSC lineage, a finding that confirms and extends the results presented by Nüsslein-Volhard and colleagues.

PLUS…

Rooting plant development

In 1993, Liam Dolan, Ben Scheres and colleagues published a paper in Development detailing the anatomical structure of the Arabidopsis root. As part of the Development Classics series, Ben Scheres discusses how this work underpinned subsequent research on root developmental biology and sparked a detailed molecular analysis of how stem cell groups are positioned and maintained in plants. See the Spotlight article on p. 939

Auxin metabolism and homeostasis during plant development

Auxin plays important roles during the entire life span of a plant. Auxin metabolism is not well understood but recent discoveries, reviewed by Karin Ljung, have started to shed light on the processes that regulate the synthesis and degradation of this important plant hormone. See the Primer article on p. 943

Specialized progenitors and regeneration

Regeneration in planarians requires a population of cells known as neoblasts. Recent data, discussed by Peter Reddien, indicate that some neoblasts express lineage-specific factors during regeneration and in uninjured animals, suggesting that an important early step in planarian regeneration is neoblast specialization. See the Hypothesis article on p. 951

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