The Node in Japan
Posted by Eva Amsen, on 30 June 2012
Earlier this month, I attended the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, which was held in Yokohama this year. I won’t go into much detail about the meeting itself, because James and Dongjin wrote some great posts about it for the Node. If you haven’t yet read them, take a look:
Day 1 – Welcome to Yokohama
Day 2 – Translation begins here in Yokohama
Day 3 – The Emperor at ISSCR
Day 4 – A complete picture
The ISSCR always encourages tweeting at their conference, and I tried to livetweet some of the talks, where possible. Although there was wifi in all the hallways and lobbies of the conference centre, and in the rooms of at least one of the hotels, there was (almost) no wifi in the seminar rooms or the exhibit hall, which is where everything happened! That may have been one of the reasons that very few people took part in the Twitter conversation. Because we were in Japan, all of the non-Japanese attendees relied on wifi for their tweeting. I did keep track of everyone’s tweets, and collected many of them in a Storify, which you can find below.
One of the things I found on Twitter was a poll started by Paul Knoepfler. He could not attend ISSCR, but set up a poll to ask participants what they thought of the conference. From the percentage distribution of the answers it seems that only about twenty people have responded, but they overwhelmingly voted that the conference was “so so”. Unfortunately none of the respondents left a response, so it’s not clear what they didn’t like, or whether they had attended the conference before. It’s a big meeting, and takes some getting used to if you’ve only been to smaller events. I personally had the impression that there were more clinical and applied posters than in previous years, but the topics covered in the talks were very broad and included a lot of fundamental research.
Another online aspect of the ISSCR Meeting was the new ISSCR Connect, allowing ISSCR attendees to catch up after the conference and see some of the talks in the concurrent sessions that they missed. They’re offered by a staggered schedule. At the moment, people who attended the conference can log in and view the talks from the first group of concurrent sessions. (No link, because it’s only available to meeting attendees.) ISSCR Connect also has a networking section, and three groups – including the Node – used ISSCR Connect to announce a small get-together.
The Node’s meetup was during the Thursday afternoon coffee break, in the Exhibition Hall. The Hall was open to everyone for coffee and posters, and people interested in meeting other developmental biologists could drop by our little corner. Some people stayed for most of the break, while others came by briefly just to say hello or to grab some freebies. To the left is a picture of our little corner before people arrived. (Once they did, I didn’t have time to take photos!)
It was interesting to note that, even though the conference was in Japan, and there were many Japanese people there, I barely met any of them. A few came by the Node coffee break, but only to take some information from the table. It’s unfortunate, because I would have liked to meet more Japanese researchers!
On this same trip, before the conference started, I had a chance to interview Development‘s newest editor, Haruhiko Koseki. He observed that, in general, Japanese students and postdocs are not as likely to join in with social activities or be as assertive as scientists from other countries, and he believes that that might actually affect their success as scientists! The full interview will appear in Development and on the Node later this year, so keep an eye out for that.
Finally, below is the Storify from the conference. (My favourite part is the exchange about invisible mice between “Yogioner” and “R.J.” on Thursday afternoon.)
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Astrocytes are the most numerous cell type in the mammalian central nervous system but little is known about the regulation of astrocyte precursor proliferation during development. Using the astrocyte marker Aldh1L1-GFP, David Rowitch and co-workers now begin to fill this gap in our knowledge (see p. 
Spatial regulation of signalling pathways during development is essential. In the Drosophila leg, a stripe of cells in each segment expresses the Notch ligand Serrate (Ser) and activates the Notch pathway, which is required to specify joints, in distal cells only. Now, on p. 
During gastrulation, the cells that give rise to internal tissues and organs move into the interior of the embryo. The gastrulation movements of endodermal and mesodermal precursors are regulated by transcription factors that also control their cell fate. However, primordial germ cells (PGCs), which also internalise during gastrulation, are transcriptionally quiescent in many species, so they must use an alternative gastrulation strategy. On p. 
The secretory epithelium protects the lungs from inhaled pathogens and other environmental insults that can lead to debilitating diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, by producing mucus. The epithelium contains several cell types, including secretory Clara cells and goblet cells, but the control of these cell fates during lung development and regeneration is poorly understood. Here (p. 
The molecular pathways that control limb bud patterning and outgrowth are well understood but less is known about limb field initiation. The current model for this process proposes that retinoic acid sits at the top of a signalling cascade that induces the apical ectodermal ridge, the signalling centre for limb outgrowth. Bone morphogenetic protein (Bmp) signalling, which is involved in later limb development, plays no part in this model, but Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte and colleagues recently noticed that Xenopus tadpoles exposed to the Bmp inhibitor Noggin during tail regeneration sometimes develop extra hindlimbs. Here (p. 
During nervous system development, the transcription factors Foxa1 and Foxa2 regulate specification of the floor plate and of midbrain dopaminergic (mDA) neurons. However, whether Foxa1 and Foxa2 act directly or indirectly by regulating the expression of sonic hedgehog (Shh), which has similar roles, is unclear. Using chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by high-throughput sequencing, Siew-Lan Ang and colleagues now identify 9160 Foxa2 binding sites that are associated with 5409 genes in embryonic stem cell-derived mDA neuron progenitors (see p. 
The Keystone Symposium entitled ‘The Life of a Stem Cell: from Birth to Death’ was held at Squaw Valley, CA, USA in March 2012. The meeting brought together researchers from across the world and showcased the most recent developments in stem cell research. Here, Chambers and Schroeder review the proceedings at this meeting and discuss the major advances in fundamental and applied stem cell biology that emerged. See the 
Hemichordates are a deuterostome phylum and closely related to chordates. They have thus been used to gain insights into the origins of deuterostome and chordate body plans. Rottinger and Lowe introduce representative hemichordate species with contrasting modes of development and summarize recent findings that are beginning to yield important insights into deuterostome developmental mechanisms. See the 
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The Young Embryologist Network (or YEN for short) held its fourth annual meeting this year on the 1st June. The conference began as a small afternoon gathering in a lecture room at UCL, but over the years it has now become a fully catered day-long event, this year filling a huge lecture theatre at the Institute for Child Health. Since the start, the ultimate aim of the meeting has been to promote interaction and collaborations between early career researchers working in developmental biology. The organisers themselves are also early career scientists, this year coming from UCL, the Institute of Child Health, NIMR and Kings College London.
