September is “back to school”-month in a lot of countries, and “back to the lab” for those lucky few who had time off. We saw this reflected on the Node with a lot of varied content and several job postings. Here’s a summary.

EMBO meeting
The annual EMBO meeting took place in Nice from September 22-25, and Eva was attending the meeting as official conference blogger. Several of her posts are still to come – including interviews with speakers – but you can see them all under the “EMBO” tag on the Node. Aside from writing summaries of conference talks, Eva had a chance to ask some of the plenary speakers for presentation tips.

“All three of them gave the same two basic tips:
1. Spend time preparing your slides. Don’t put too much information on them.
2. Always keep your audience in mind. They don’t know as much about your field as you do.
What they did not agree on was whether or not you should practise your talk.”

Node readers can share their views on practising talks in the poll in the post. Most of you do diligently practise your presentations!

Speaking of conferences: don’t forget to add upcoming conferences to our calendar! You will need an active Node account to do so, and you can register here.

Research – the Tamura lab’s earthquake experience
This summer, Tohru Yano, from Koji Tamura’s lab, published a paper on zebrafish fin development, but he had to overcome a few unusual obstacles to finish the work: Their lab was damaged in the 2011 earthquake in Japan, destroying some equipment, and leaving the fish without easy access to fresh water. Read his post about what happened behind the scenes.

“When our water tank for fish became depleted of water after two weeks, we filtered water from a well at a place far from our fish room (the only place to obtain water in the campus) and we carried heavy plastic containers filled with water to the fish room. We were able to keep all of the fish lines alive (I had maintained the fish lines with tender care for six years from when I was an undergraduate student without the assistance of any fish technicians).”

“(…) We returned the fluorescence microscopes and DNA sequence analyzer back to their original positions, but they all fell onto the floor again when a big aftershock occurred.”

Luckily, they had help from several organisations to get them back on track within just a few months.

Images
The Glasgow Science Centre is looking for images depicting early embryogenesis in various organisms. If you have some, get in touch with them, and your images might end up in a museum exhibit!

Rachael highlighted the developmental biology images amongst this year’s Wellcome Image Award winners. Both images were taken by Vincent Pasque.

Finally, Node users voted for another Development cover from four images taken by Woods Hole Embryology course students. This was the last batch from the 2011 students, but the 2012 students took some great images as well, and we’ll have those on the site later.

Also on the Node:
–Several new job ads
–Stem cell map of Europe
–Update on Node tech updates

(3 votes)

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International Stem Cell Awareness Day is October 3, 2012, so on this day please help spread the word about the importance of stem cell research!   For more information on this day (and free wallpapers and downloadable stem cell images), visit StemCellsOfferHope.com, which is affiliated with the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine.  In celebration of this day, I just created a post on my blog at AllThingsStemCell that includes a summary of stem cell history and recent research breakthroughs and highlights.

(2 votes)

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At the EMBO meeting earlier this week, I had the opportunity to ask a few of the plenary speakers how they prepared for their talks. These speakers all had clear presentations that were easy to follow, even if you didn’t know much about the background of their field. It turns out that that was no coincidence: they consciously designed their talks that way.

I asked Ingrid Grummt, Jiří Friml, and Linda Partridge how they prepared for their talks, and if they had any tips for people who are due to give a conference presentation.

All three of them gave the same two basic tips:

1. Spend time preparing your slides. Don’t put too much information on them.
2. Always keep your audience in mind. They don’t know as much about your field as you do.

What they did not agree on was whether or not you should practise your talk. Linda Partridge is a proponent of practising, while Ingrid Grummt said she doesn’t practise her presentations. It comes down to your personal preference. Do you practise?

Friml said that he also considered his slot in the day’s conference programme. As EMBO Gold Medal winner, he was scheduled as the last speaker before dinner, so he tried to make his talk entertaining at points. One memorable quote from his lecture: “Plants also undergo embryogenesis. Keep that in mind next time you’re eating peanuts, please.”

Finally, the EMBO Meeting YouTube channel also has a video with useful presentation tips from Jon Copley. You’ll notice a lot of overlap with the advice collected above:

With these tips, your next talk is going to be amazing!

(Full interviews with Jiří Friml and Linda Partridge will appear on the Node later, as well as a summary of the last few days of the meeting.)

(3 votes)

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It was a close race at times, but the bat embryo was able to maintain its lead to become the winner of the latest Woods Hole image competition. This bat will appear on the cover of Development soon:

The image shows an Alcian blue staining of a Stage 17 bat (Carollia perspicillata) embryo, and was taken by Lingyu Wang and Ketty Lee. Congratulations!

In second place is a skeletal preparation of red-eared slider (turtle) by Megan Martik, Jane Yu, John Young, and Eric Brooks. The mouse embryo staining by Juliette Petersen and Rachel K. Miller came in third, followed by the 3D reconstruction of zebrafish embryo head vascularisation by Meghan Morrissey and Lynn Kee.

These were the last images from the 2011 course, but the students who took the course this past summer have also produced some stunning images, which will be vying for a cover spot later.

(4 votes)

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I am looking for an enthusiastic postdoc to work in my lab on stem cell biology in the cnidarian Hydractinia. The person should have a strong background in developmental biology, cell/molecular biology or in a related area. The position will be available in January 2013, initially for two years but can be extended by additional two years. For further details contact me at uri.frank@nuigalway.ie and have a look at our website www.nuigalway.ie/frank

Uri Frank

School of Natural Sciences

Regenerative Medicine Institute

National University of Ireland, Galway

Galway, Ireland

(2 votes)

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EuroStemCell is an EC-funded project that aims to help European citizens make sense of stem cells, by providing reliable, independent information and road-tested educational resources on stem cells and their impact on society.

We’ve recently launched an interactive stem cell map of Europe – featuring stem cell news, events, regulations, research centres and more. Take a look, have a play, and let us know what you think. And if you would like a guided tour, social scientist Emma King will be exploring the map this week, and posting some of her highlights on Twitter.

One aim of the map is to build up a picture of stem cell research in Europe, and we’d like your help to fill in some of the blanks. We have published summaries of how stem cell research is regulated in 15 European countries so far, and we would now like to extend this information with some personal stories by researchers working in the field.

Would you like to appear on the map, and write for us about your work with stem cells? We’re interested in exploring questions like:

* Where do the cells you work with come from?
* How do you get permission to use them?
* What guidelines do you have to follow?
* How do cell lines move between labs and around Europe?

Interested? Contact Kate or Emma to find out more about what’s involved, or for inspiration, take a look at blogs other researchers have written for us: Beate Roese-Korner’s blog; Anestis Tsakiridis’ blog; Selina Wray’s blog.

(1 votes)

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Biology is studied at different levels of size: molecules, cells, organisms, and entire ecosystems. The second day of the EMBO meeting covered all of these.

The plenary opening session on RNA covered the molecular. David Tollervey and Elisa Izaurralde described biochemical processes in RNA processing and post-transcriptional regulation, and Rob Singer showed techniques to follow single mRNA molecules through their lifetime.

In the breakout session on cell competition, several speakers described the processes by which neighbouring cells communicate with each other and decide who survives and who dies. Laura Johnston focussed on homeostatic signalling pathways that determine cell competition, and how this affects organ growth. What happens to the cells that lose the cell competition? Jean-Paul Vincent showed how dying cells in the developing fly wing are delaminated (excluded from the epithelium). And what do the winner cells do? According to Eduardo Moreno, winner cells kill loser cells, but then “leave the corpses”: other cells are in charge of removing the loser cells. More about this interesting breakout session can be found in Ben Short’s account on the JCB blog.

In the afternoon I attended the optogenetics session, to learn a bit about this technique. Optogenetics is a way to use lightresponsive receptors and guided light stimulation to induce cell behaviour in living organisms. For example, Herwig Baier used the technique to monitor eye movements and prey capturing behaviour in zebrafish embryos.

This year’s special lecture was given by Eric Karsenti, and covered biology at the ecosystem scale. Karsenti integrated the microscopic with the macroscopic in his talk: He described circulation and currents in the oceans, considering the planet as a whole, but dove into the molecular detail of the world’s oceans when he talked about the data that his TARA OCEANS project collected. The TARA project involved sailing around the world along a preplanned route that would cover as many different ecosystems as possible, and collecting not just biological samples, but also measuring oceanographic data along the way. The voyage involved two hundred people from 35 countries, who collected 27,000 biological samples at 153 measuring stations. The numbers of samples and the amount of data collected is absolutely staggering, and you can find out more on the TARA OCEANS website. I really enjoyed seeing some of the videos that Karsenti showed at the end of his talk: everywhere the boat moored, local school kids got a chance to visit the ship, and everyone on board – from sailing staff to scientists – was able to educate visitors about the project.

Following Karsenti was EMBO Gold Medal winner Jiří Friml, but I’ll leave that for a separate post, as I also had a chance to interview him separately for the Node.

In the evening I attended the PhD Meets Postdoc party, despite being neither a PhD student nor a postdoc. It was great to meet so many people there from labs around the world: Not quite as much variation as Karsenti found in the oceans, but it was close!

(3 votes)

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Hello Everyone,

I represent one of two PhD students from the lab of Dr Kim Dale at the University of Dundee currently engaged in designing an exhibit for the new exhibition ‘BodyWorks’ at the Glasgow Science Centre (GSC) due to open in March next year. The exhibition itself, which will be based on the whole of the third floor of the GSC, contains 115 exhibits and will be open for a minimum of 5 years over which time it is anticipated reach 2 million plus visitors. The exhibition will endeavour to engage the public in the development and everyday workings of the human body and inform them of current research.

As embryologists, my colleague and I have been entrusted with designing the exhibit ‘Find the Human.’ The exhibit is designed to communicate the similarity of vertebrate species during early development and thus help the public better understand the value of research which employs the use of model organisms.  As an interactive exhibit, members of the public will try to match different embryonic stages of development for 4 different species on a series of tumble drums; which hopefully will prove to be more difficult than they may expect!

Our role in designing this exhibit is to source high resolution images (300dpi) for 4 equivalent developmental stages in 4/5 different species; human, mouse, chick, bat and turtle – it is in this aspect we ask for your help!

We are looking for images of embryonic stages which summarise early prenatal development, but would gladly accept any relevant images that you may wish to share for possible use in the exhibition. This is a fantastic public engagement opportunity which has the potential inspire new generations of young scientists and increase public awareness of current scientific research in developmental biology.

If you think you may be able to lend a hand in our search for these images, please contact: c.s.l.bailey@dundee.ac.uk

For details of the forthcoming BodyWorks exhibition @ Glasgow Science Centre and to find out how exhibition development is going, visit: http://glasgowsciencecentre.tumblr.com/

I would like to thank you for your time and convey our appreciation for any assistance you could provide to help us source these images.

(4 votes)

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SCHOOL OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE ● Ref: RA876

£30,122 per annum                                                                

A postdoctoral position to investigate the role of microRNAs in skeletal muscle development and differentiation is available in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. The full time post will be part of a dynamic research group and fully integrated in a collaborative working environment. The position is funded by the BBSRC and is available from 1 November 2012, or as soon as possible thereafter, for a fixed term period of 3 years.

Closing date:  12 noon on 5 October 2012.

For more information please contact Andrea Münsterberg, a.munsterberg[at]uea.ac.uk

Further particulars and an application form are available on our website: www.uea.ac.uk/hr/jobs/ or Tel. 01603 593493.

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When Dr. Eva Amsen, Community Manager for the Node and Online Editor for Development, recommended me to write this post in connection with our recent publication about mechanisms of pectoral fin development in zebrafish, she was anxious to know the continuation of a story in Nature News last year after the earthquake (commented by my supervisor, Professor Koji Tamura, Tohoku University in Japan). We had almost forgotten our inexpressible anguish until Eva’s indication. Though it is true that we experienced a terrible disaster, what did we really suffer from? What kind of message should we give to readers? Although we decided to write this post about the road to publication of our article, I had hesitated to write it for a long time because I did not know from what I should begin to write.

Since our laboratory is located on a hill far from the sea, we were not directly affected by the tsunami, but the shock of the earthquake depressed us. Our fish room suffered from loss of power (for three days) and suspension of water supply (for three weeks). In other fish rooms in Tohoku University, many fish lines were lost because of low temperatures or damage caused by the earthquake. Fortunately, our fish room is located on the ground floor with air tightness maintained, I therefore decided to reduce feeding frequency to once every four days (to prevent water pollution) and reduce water circulation (to prevent excessive evaporation). When our water tank for fish became depleted of water after two weeks, we filtered water from a well at a place far from our fish room (the only place to obtain water in the campus) and we carried heavy plastic containers filled with water to the fish room. We were able to keep all of the fish lines alive (I had maintained the fish lines with tender care for six years from when I was an undergraduate student without the assistance of any fish technicians). Our laboratory also had other animals (frogs and reptiles) and most of them could be maintained, though some of them lost their ability to reproduce.
In our laboratory rooms (on the fifth floor of a six-story building), everything on the benches and desks fell down and many things were destroyed when the earthquake struck. We returned the fluorescence microscopes and DNA sequence analyzer back to their original positions, but they all fell onto the floor again when a big aftershock occurred. I remember that we were so depressed. The Japanese Government and Tohoku University provided money for repair. Four months later, we were able to restart experiments (though we could not concentrate on work immediately). Because of this chaotic period lasting for four months, submission of our manuscript to Development was delayed, and the PhD thesis defense was affected. Nevertheless, we received support from scientific communities all over the world. I was supposed to attend the JSDB-GFE Joint Meeting of Developmental Biology in Dresden (March 23-26, 2011), but I could not attend it. The German Society of Developmental Biologists supported our registration fee that we had cancelled. ZIRC (Zebrafish International Resource Center, USA) provided fish resources for us in order to allow us to restart experiments smoothly. In Japan, the CDB (Center for Developmental Biology) provided a shuttle bus to transport people and supplies. We received support from many people and organizations, and most of the costs for restoration were provided by public funds including donations from throughout the world. I appreciate this blessed environment, and consequently I could publish my article. However, there are still many people who are in need of support.
Earthquakes occur suddenly with almost no warning. After the earthquake, Koji decided to rearrange throughout the laboratory space and make anti-earthquake reinforcements. Both the number of casualties and the amount of money needed for restoration can be reduced by taking appropriate precautions against future possible disasters. It is also important to share experiences or information among scientists in order to be prepared for future disasters (the Node website is an advanced effort to communicate with developmental biologists/stem cell researchers throughout the world).     We cannot thank you enough for your kindness!

Yano, T., Abe, G., Yokoyama, H., Kawakami, K. & Tamura, K. (2012). Mechanism of pectoral fin outgrowth in zebrafish development, Development, 139 (16) 2925. DOI: 10.1242/dev.075572

(14 votes)

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