The 2012 Spring meeting of the British Society for Developmental Biology was held on the 15^th-18^th April at the spacious campus of Warwick University.  The meeting was held jointly with the Japanese Society for Developmental Biology and the British Society for Cell Biology. Many delegates from the JSDB attended, presented interesting talks and posters and greatly enlivened proceedings.

Sunday: Plenary lectures

The evening BSDB plenary lecture was given by Denis Duboule on the vertebrate Hox clock, describing the regulation of temporally and spatially collinearly expressed Hox genes. Focusing on the HoxD cluster, he described the use of ChIP and chromatin crosslinking to map the state of Hox gene packaging at different points in the Hox expression clock, presenting a directional chromatin transition-mediated model for temporal regulation of Hox gene expression within a Hox cluster. The BSCB plenary lecture by J.Richard McIntosh of the University of Colorado discussed microtubule tips as mechano-chemical devices, describing work showing how microtubules are capable of transporting loads at the depolymerising pole of the microtubule through the behaviour of depolarising filaments.

The joint plenary session was a great start to the conference on Sunday night, followed by the student and post-doc social pub quiz (joined by a few BSDB committee members), a great chance for some in-depth student socialising. Honourable mention to the winners of the coveted ‘best team name’ prize, Insane in the Phospholipid Bilayer, for making everyone laugh.

Monday: Systems biology, scientific careers,  imaging in development, and a turbulent AGM

The day’s first session on systems biology and next generation genome sequencing was opened by Duncan Odom speaking on transcriptional regulation in mammals, looking in particular at non-conserved promoter sequences that produce conserved  transcription factor binding patterns along the cis-regulatory region. Shane Herbert described the role of the homeobox gene hlx1 in sprouting endothelial tubules in zebrafish angiogenesis, introducing the tip/stalk model of growing blood vessels that appeared again in later talks. Erika Sasaki of the Institute for Experimental Animals in Kawasaki gave a fascinating talk on the use of lentiviral vectors in the generation of transgenic marmosets and the applications of transgenic primates in neurological and preclinical research. Kazuo Emoto from the Osaka Bioscience Institute opened the second half of the session with a talk on the shaping of Drosophila sensory neuron dendritic trees into sensory lattices through growth, calcium-current related pruning, regrowth and reshaping.

The Monday lunchtime career panel of PIs arranged by conference organiser Kim Dale dispensed advice and answered post-doc and student questions. The process of carving out a distinct and different niche in your field was discussed, as well as the importance of having and nurturing a passion for your chosen research subject – to sustain you through the inevitable lows (“It doesn’t stop hurting, but you eventually grow numb…”) of labwork, publishing and funding as well as the highs.  The impact of uncertainty and mobility in scientific careers on partners was also discussed, with the panel mentioning the necessity of discussing the burdens of scientific spouses. There was also mention of the importance of awareness of the ticking fellowship clock, with panellists stressing that many independent fellowships are restricted to applicants within 6 years of their PhD award.  For those interested in interdisciplinary research, the EIPOD EMBL postdoctoral fellowship program was recommended later in the conference.

The Monday afternoon session contained a range of talks on imaging space and time during development. Elliot Meyerowitz of the new Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge (who have a stated wealth of funding, positions and space, for all the plant developmental biologists reading) gave the lone but highly engaging plant development talk of the conference on shoot apical meristem patterning, including computer modelling of the role of both morphogens and physical forces on cells in the spiral pattern of meristem development. Toshiko Fujimori presented findings on cilia development and function in the mouse oviduct. He focused on the role of planar cell polarity in cilia orientation and oviduct membrane folding, demonstrating the links between micro and macroscopic organ morphology.

Antonio Jacinto’s talk on epithelial wound closure showcased some interesting videos of laser ablation and wound healing in Drosophila epithelial sheets, unpicking the rapid cytoskeletal processes behind the epithelial cell reshaping response to injury. Georgina Stooke-Vaughn from Sheffield University gave an assured talk on her ongoing PhD work on otolith development and hair cell cilia in the developing zebrafish vestibular system. Ryoichiro Kageyama of Kyoto University spoke on ultradian (shorter than circadian) rhythms in the somite segmentation clock in mouse, focusing on the processes behind and downstream of oscillations in Hes7 expression in the presomitic mesoderm. Hes expression oscillation was a popular theme, also appearing in several posters and the Beddington medal talk.

Finishing the afternoon session with a bang, the Hooke medal talk was delivered by Holger Gerhardt of Cancer Research UK on cell competition and vascular development in zebrafish, discussing tip and stalk cell dynamics in growing epithelial tubules. He presented both experimental and compelling visualised mathematical model evidence for a regulatory network involving VEGF and Notch that patterns angiogenic branching at intervals along the zebrafish spine.

The BSDB AGM took place on Monday evening. The vote to fill 3 open BSDB committee spaces was held, and it was announced later in the conference the new members are Anna Philpott, Jo Begbie and Henry Roehl. It was also announced that future spring meetings will be held at Warwick University for the next few years.

The evening poster session was lively and stimulating, with freely flowing ideas and beer.

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Discussions
We launched an essay competition, “Developments in development”. If you have any thoughts on the future of developmental biology – whether it’s about techniques, funding, or the general direction of the field – submit an essay before July 2nd, for a chance to be published in Development. For full details, see this post.

Speaking of the future, Tom Butts considered the recent “Academic Spring” movement. What is it, and is the name appropriate? Weigh in the comments of the post.

“Such as it is, the academic spring is not a movement directed at individual governments, but at international business practices – in that sense it shares more in common with the Occupy movement than the Arab Spring. It is not an undirected and unpredictable public protest movement, but a quiet and deliberate articulation of objection to a single company, in adherence to a well thought through and principled position. It is then, certainly academic. I’m just not sure it has sprung yet.”

Conferences

Conference season is in full swing. Have you been to any meetings yet? Vicky Hatch attended the 2012 UK National Xenopus Conference, and shared her experience.

Earlier this month, the joint meeting of the British Societies for Cell and Developmental Biology and the Japanese Society for Developmental Biology took place at the University of Warwick. A full report is in progress, but you can already have a look at the collection of tweets from the meeting, and an interview with Beddington Medal winner Boyan Bonev.

Lauren Killip attended the Canadian Developmental Biology Conference in Banff.

Also on the Node:
-Philip Washbourne describes how his lab worked with GeneTools to develop and optimize photo-morpholinos for use in zebrafish.
-You voted for a Development cover and chose an image of a skate. More to come soon.
-Kim Cooper is doing field work in China to collect jerboa embryos to study limb development.
-Erin Campbell gives the backstory about an image that demonstrates how stem cells are kept in place in the Drosophila germline niche.

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Although there was no “official hashtag” to be used on Twitter, several attendees of the recent BSCB/BSDB/JSDB meeting were livetweeting the event. I tried to keep up, and collected several of the tweets in this Storify, so you can see what was discussed online during the conference. A full report from the meeting is on its way as well.

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We have been getting pretty good videos for the past few days, but it seems the animals have realized we aren’t actually predators and have gone on strike. After the first night of filming, Talia was dissatisfied with the lighting and visibility of the animals, so we decided to get a few more lights and dust the jerboas with glitter to make them more reflective and easier to track. Yes, we bedazzled already adorable rodents. Each one got dropped in a plastic bag and exploded out in a poof of fabulousness. I have named one particularly good runner “Speedy Sparklepants”. They are hilarious.

It’s okay that these individuals gave up on running for us, because these 5-toed jerboas are actually not that hard to catch. They do freeze in the light better than the 3-toed ones, so we’ve actually been able to catch them along the road. The driver has an eagle eye for determining whether objects in the road are rocks or jerboas, and he navigates the car to help spotlight the animals in the high beams. Tonight Yang even caught two with his bare hands since we had given our few remaining unbroken nets back to the guy who is off catching 3-toed jerboas for us tonight. These jerboas are amazing runners, and Talia got pretty good infrared video of a chase and catch as one went zigzagging along the asphalt. I wish they would have the fear of an untimely demise like that when we’re filming in a calibrated setup where she could actually track their movement and get useful data out of it.

As we were approaching the field station this evening, a football-sized trundling critter appeared along the very edge of the road. It wasn’t moving very fast. Turns out it ordinarily doesn’t have to. It was a hedgehog! We all jumped out of the car, and Yang still had on his work gloves, so he just scooped it up into the palms of both hands. The poor little guy immediately pulled his face and legs into a completely enclosed ball of spines. We stood around laughing and marveling at his coolness, and then Yang said “ok, I’m going to take it back to Urumqi tomorrow.” He’s returning for a day or two to take care of some things, and the folks in his lab seem to have decided that they can care for any small animal they can catch. The trouble is that we no longer had any empty cages in the car that could contain the guy. Yang was close to just dropping him in the trunk until we convinced him that was a really bad idea, so he jumped in the front seat instead. We were only just around the corner from the field station anyway, but the driver seemed quite concerned he would unball himself and get loose in the car, so he held a screwdriver at the ready and tapped the hedgehog a few times when it seemed he felt the coast was clear. He’s now chilling in a cage in the lab. Probably a little annoyed that he was just trundling along, minding his own business…

We’ve also been having a great time immersing ourselves in the local Kazakh culture. Yesterday we had to head into Fukang to find glitter and a few more flashlights to illuminate the arena, so we made an afternoon of it. I now know the Chinese characters for camel, and I have to admit that I now understand the pictographic nature of the language – the characters luo tuo actually really do look like two camels. Yang asked if we wanted to try camel’s milk, so we all had our eyes peeled for the characters for camel until we found a lower level shop selling camel’s milk and camel yoghurt. This was such a huge traveler’s no no – unpasteurized dairy products. But the local people were coming in a steady stream, it was all refrigerated, and I have a supply of antibiotics just in case. It was tasty. The yoghurt was a bit strange. Super tart and tasted very slightly carbonated with tiny chunks. The milk though was amazing. Thick rich whole milk with a slightly grassy flavor more like yak’s milk. We bought a half liter and used it to make milk tea the next morning. Yummy. The same shop also sold fabric items: Kazakh wedding dresses, pillow forms, and various bits of bedding and decorations. Sarah and I spent a solid hour rifling through piles of gorgeous pieces with brightly colored floral patterns embroidered in a traditional Kazakh style. I found a wall hanging that’s meant to go behind a bedframe or along the wall behind a sofa. It’s going to be a gorgeous conversation piece in my future house some day.

We set off this morning in search of cardboard pieces so that Talia can build a trackway to film the animals’ movement up close on a sandy substrate, and after scavenging through the local recycling center, Sarah and Yang went off to the desert to bring back buckets of sand while Talia and I took care of a few things at the field station. They returned about an hour later, and Sarah bounced out of the car yelling “Hurry, they’re going to take us to the horse races! Kazakh horse races!” So we all piled into the car and drove a few minutes south of 222 and out into an open field full of people, cars, trailers, and motorcycles. There were several hundred Kazakh people excitedly watching the horses race past on the bare dusty earth. The story I got was that a wealthy Kazakh man in the area arranged the races in celebration of his son or daughter’s wedding. The Kazakh horses are a bit smaller than horses we’re familiar with, and they were ridden bareback by young men/older boys. The track is 5 kilometers around, and they have to run the track in 6 laps, so it’s more of a race for endurance than speed. These poor horses had worked up a lather by the time we arrived since they were on the last lap. I’m not sure who won, because I was too distracted by all of the men trying very enthusiastically to communicate with us. As soon as we arrived, so many curious pairs of eyes focused on us. Two big burly guys kept wanting to pose for photos with us, and a whole family asked me to take their picture. Super warm and friendly people which made the whole experience just as much about the folks watching the race as it was about the race itself. And back to the topic of camels – apparently the top prize for the race was one camel. I wish I’d been able to race and win a camel.

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We just got back from the desert about a half hour ago, at 2:30 am, after a pretty successful evening. We also went earlier in the day to build a fenced off enclosure where we could run the animals in front of Talia’s infrared cameras. As we were getting into the car, I said to the girls “I’m not expecting anything, but I’m curious to see if the driver decides to pitch in at any point since he seems really interested in what we’re doing.” I didn’t expect it because we’ve only hired the guy as a driver, not to help with the field work. But he quickly surprised me by heading straight up the sand dune with us and then helping Talia to construct the fenced area while Sarah and I set traps to see what we might catch this evening (6 more gerbils for anyone who is keeping count). By the time we returned to where they were working, they had all of the stakes in the ground and the netting in place and were wiring the last side. Pretty good teamwork with some charades and basic Chinese.

The driver was concerned about leaving our things in the desert and wanted to call someone to come keep watch while we went back into town for dinner, but we convinced him that no one would bother any of it. Plus he stopped as we were leaving and asked some folks who were collecting medicinal plants in the desert to just keep an eye out for as long as they would be there. It was getting dark soon anyway, so I wasn’t too worried about more people coming along. After dinner, we rallied again and headed back to our study location to get some animals moving. The Chinese man who had been catching animals for us came along, and we sent him and Yang off to do some catching and bring a few more of the 5-toed jerboas. They weren’t even gone long before they returned with five animals. I think they are relatively easy to catch as far as jerboas go. They jump around a lot more than the 3-toed ones, but they seem to startle in the light better.

So we got all of the lights and cameras set up and got animals into the enclosure one by one, starting with one of the gerbils. He just kind of went bonkers everywhere and kept trying to climb the netted walls of the enclosure. His galloping run looks pretty awesome on the high speed video. The 3-toed guys just sort of hop about and don’t seem bothered by much, but the 5-toed ones are a lot more active. Toward the end, once we got all of the lights in the right positions and figured out how to get good video, the last one we used was hoppy all over the place. Really good study animal, so he got a star in hopes he’ll continue to perform well.

After about three hours of running around, we decided it was good for a first trial and packed up shop to head back. As we were loading things back into the research building at the field station, I noticed there were two boxes in the middle of the entry way floor that were about the size of old TV boxes. And they were making noises. Clearly something alive was inside. I was surprised, because I thought we were the only ones working on animals here. Everyone we’ve talked to is doing work on soil or plants. So we flicked on the lights and cautiously approached to discover that each box contained about 10 live chickens. Sarah and I busted out laughing. She pulled out her iphone and started documenting a short video. She’s been pretty good about narrating videos of what we’ve been seeing and doing. I think it’s the delirium of the late hour combined with the fact that there were two boxes of chickens in the research building, but we just kept laughing between blank-faced statements of “Of course there are chickens. Why wouldn’t there be?”

So I’m back, it’s 3 am, I’m showered, and I know that every mole or skin tag on my body really is a mole or a skin tag. That had to be determined before I could sleep well tonight. I’ve blogged about this in past years – the drawback to the awesomeness of camels in the desert is that there are also camel ticks in the desert. And they’re disgusting. I’ve seen a half dozen or so, including one I pulled off my leg before it had managed to latch on for a meal. That was before I got smart and tucked my pants into my socks. They drop out of the shrubs and follow you through the desert, so you have to keep moving to keep them off. That’s tough when you’re in a fixed position next to a camera for an extended period of time. Sarah flicked one off her leg earlier in the day and pulled another off of the back of Talia’s shirt. She thought they were spiders because they have weirdly long spindly legs, but nope. They’re definitely ticks. And we have another week of experiences that are starting to give me signs of delusional parasitosis.

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Each year, the British Society for Developmental Biology awards the Beddington Medal for the best PhD thesis in developmental biology. At the 2012 BSDB meeting, this award went to Boyan Bonev, who completed his PhD in Nancy Papalopulu’s lab at the University of Manchester. At the conference, Boyan gave a talk about his PhD work, describing how microRNA-9 promotes neural progenitor heterogeneity in a context-dependent manner. Find out more about Boyan’s work, and what he’s up to next, in this interview.

What was your thesis about?

My graduate work was about the role of the microRNA miR-9 in neural development. MicroRNAs are a really exciting part of the genome, because they’re small, non-coding RNAs. They were discovered about ten years ago, and since then there’s been a tremendous amount of research carried out to find out what exactly their role is. There are many occasions where microRNAs have an essential role, particularly during development. What I wanted to find out is how miR-9 regulates neural development, in particular in vertebrates. MiR-9 has a really interesting  expression pattern: the microRNA is present in the brain, but expressed differently in different parts of the brain. So, the really cool thing about miR-9 is that it turned out to have a context-dependent function, and this is really the key highlight of my thesis. It means that in some parts of the brain miR-9 does one thing, and in other parts it does something else. During development it also changes its function. For example, in my talk I talked about progenitor heterogeneity, and how miR-9 can regulate this, but we also looked at its function in mature neurons, where it does something else entirely, which is to modulate axon branching and axon extension. It’s really cool how nature seems to be using one molecular mechanism in a different way, depending on where you look along the anterior-posterior axis, or at which developmental stage the organism is, to get feedback about what decisions the cells need to make.

You showed work in both frog and mouse. Which one do you prefer to work with?

To be honest I find working with both of them really exciting. Working with frogs is a little bit easier, because they develop externally, so it’s easier to get sufficient numbers and it’s easier to manipulate them from the very beginning. They’re a really good model organism for studying early developmental events in particular. However, to work on something that is more closely related to the human brain, which is ideally what we want to understand, mouse is the better system. That’s why I started to work more and more on mouse, especially in the last part of my PhD. Other than that they’re both really nice organisms to work with.

In your talk you described how a microRNA target in turn regulates the microRNA. Is that a common mechanism?

There are not that many instances where such negative feedback regulation is known, but I think it’s becoming more and more prevalent that this is indeed a very interesting type of regulation. Not just for microRNAs, but also in the case of transcription factors with negative feedback loops. I think what is really important to consider is that these transcription factors and microRNAs do not work in isolation – they all work together with all their partners. And these kind of feedback loops, whether they are coherent or incoherent feedback loops, are the ones that buffer against developmental noise or reinforce a decision. In our case this was a negative feedback loop that was doing both, because it was promoting oscillations, but it was also reinforcing developmental decisions.

What are you doing now?

I was supposed to have a bit of a long break between my PhD and before I started my postdoc, but it boiled down to about ten days in the end. Right now I’m going back to my home country, Bulgaria, to have the rest of the ten days off. At the end of the month I’m leaving for the States to start working on my postdoc.

What will you be doing in your postdoc?

That’s going to be another cool and exciting project. It’s also related to non-coding RNAs and neural development, but it’s completely different from what I’ve been doing so far. It focuses on a different, newer, type of non-coding RNAs: long non-coding RNAs. I told you that microRNAs are about ten years old – well, these long ncRNAs are about 3-4 years old.

I’m going to Harvard, where  I will be working in the lab of John Rinn, who is one of the guys who discovered long ncRNAs, and in Paula Arlotta’s lab, who is an expert in mouse neural development, in particular mouse cortical development. I’m going to be working with both of them to try to figure out the function of long ncRNAs in mouse neural development.

Do you have any advice for new PhD students?

Be persistent. At some point, things will probably stop working, and you’re going to be struggling to figure out why they’re not working. What I always say is that the result is the result. Your inability to figure out why it is like that is the problem. But usually things like technical difficulties or problems with the model organism have a meaning, and you have to be persistent and really go down to the details to figure out what’s going on.

Bonev, B., Pisco, A., & Papalopulu, N. (2011). MicroRNA-9 Reveals Regional Diversity of Neural Progenitors along the Anterior-Posterior Axis Developmental Cell, 20 (1), 19-32 DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2010.11.018

Dajas-Bailador, F., Bonev, B., Garcez, P., Stanley, P., Guillemot, F., & Papalopulu, N. (2012). microRNA-9 regulates axon extension and branching by targeting Map1b in mouse cortical neurons Nature Neuroscience, 15 (5), 697-699 DOI: 10.1038/nn.3082

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Abstract deadline: 27 July 2012 | Registration deadline: 1 September 2012

Building on the success of last year’s event, ECD 2012 will bring together scientists from the fields of epigenomics, genetics and bioinformatics to discuss the latest developments in this fast-moving field. This Wellcome Trust conference will discuss recent advances focusing on genome-wide approaches that are revolutionizing the field. Recent technological developments have made it possible to conduct epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) to investigate the link between changes to the epigenome and the development of disease. Sessions will include: epigenomic studies across of a range of common diseases, including psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders and diseases of the immune system; model organisms and model systems; mathematical approaches to epigenomics; intergenerational and environmental effects; and translational epigenomics.

Abstract submission is strongly encouraged as a significant number of presentations will be selected from the abstracts.

Scientific organising committee:
Stephan Beck, University College London, UK
Susan Clark, The Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Australia
Andy Feinberg, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, USA
Anne Ferguson-Smith, University of Cambridge, UK

Venue:
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD, USA

Keynote Speakers:
Shelley Berger, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Bert Vogelstein, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, USA

Invited Speakers include:
Stephan Beck, University College London, UK
Jessica Connelly, University of Virginia, USA
Daniele Fallin, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA
Andy Feinberg, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, USA
Doug Higgs, University of Oxford, UK
Tim Huang, University of Texas Health Science Center, USA
Barbara Knowles, ASTAR, Singapore
X. Shirley Liu, Dana-Farber/Harvard School of Public Health, USA
Shalini Oberdoerffer, National Cancer Institute, USA
Dirk Schübeler, Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Switzerland
Amos Tanay, Weizmann Institute, Israel
Toshikazu Ushijima, National Cancer Center Research Institute, Japan

For more information: https://registration.hinxton.wellcome.ac.uk/display_info.asp?id=298

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The sophistication of genetic tools and the relative ease of breeding and housing mean that the mouse is the most widely used mammalian organism for basic and biomedical research. The genotype-phenotype information that will emerge from the efforts of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC), now well into its first year, will advance all areas of the biological sciences, from behaviour to drug discovery, oncology to developmental biology.

The IMPC is one of the largest model-organism-based initiatives ever funded. Its aim is to generate and comprehensively characterise the phenotypes of viable knockouts for every gene in the mouse genome, and to compile the information in a public database (Brown & Moore, 2012). In practical terms, this means creating ~20,000 viable mouse lines and phenotyping them using dozens of tests, a feat that will be carried out through the coordinated efforts of several institutes in nine different countries. Moreover, the ~30% of knockouts that are expected to show embryonic lethality will be characterised, where possible, using specialised tests performed during embryonic development. The number and sophistication of tests used for phenotyping will likely increase as the protocols are refined and improved, and as notable mouse strains are selected for specialised phenotyping in secondary screens. For example, histopathology – the analysis of disease correlates through microscopic examination of tissues obtained from necropsy or biopsy – provides invaluable information that is complementary to in vivo assays, but it can currently only be performed on selected lines owing to economical and logistical constraints (Schofield et al., 2012).

The resources that will be generated by the IMPC include free access to all knockout mouse lines (or sperm) and a comprehensive database of corresponding phenotype information. These resources generated will be of value to investigators at all levels, and in many disciplines, from undergraduates to group leaders, basic scientists to clinicians.

Further reading

Brown, S. D. M. and Moore, M. Towards an encyclopaedia of mammalian gene function: the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium. (2012). Dis. Model. Mech. 5, 289-292.

Schofield P. N., Vogel, P., Gkoutos G. V., Sundberg, J. P. (2012). Exploring the elephant: histopathology in high-throughput phenotyping of mutant mice. Dis. Model. Mech. 5, 19-25.

Straight talk with… Steve Brown. Interview by Hannah Waters. (2011). Nat. Med. 17, 1332.

January 2012 DMM Podcast: Paul Schofield on histopathology in high-throughput phenotyping of mutant mice.

IMPC website: http://www.mousephenotype.org/

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Now the real adventures begin. We arrived at the field station on Sunday and met with The Fixer on Monday afternoon to discuss arranging a driver for the next week or so. We explained to him what the goals are, where we’d like to go, the time of day/night, duration of the trip, and asked for a price estimate before we go to negotiate with the drivers. There are a bunch of drivers at the market, so I figured we’d just go that way and see who gives us the best price. He started to go on about how it’s complicated to say how much it will cost because of variables like the time, road conditions, etc. I just wanted a ballpark for price per kilometer or price per hour so I’d know what to expect and where to start. Somewhere in these negotiations, a driver pulled up – a friend of The Fixer who he wanted us to hire. At some point in the “it’s complicated” negotiations that a Chinese student (Yang) was trying to help me with, Sarah interrupted and took over negotiating for me. The whole game changed. She got them to understand that it doesn’t have to be complicated because they already know all of the variables. She also got them to agree to an estimate for the first day with room for each side to negotiate if either I or the driver don’t think the price is fair. The Chinese student seemed a little astonished that this worked so well, and it validated the argument I’d been making about her value to the institute – she managed to help reach an agreement far more quickly than if we’d done things in a more Chinese and left room for flexibility on both sides. This was probably only possible though because I’ve cultivated a reputation for honesty.

So off we went to explore the desert. We visited the location I’d gone to a few weeks ago along the oil highway where I’d seen lots of tracks and where we’d been told there are lots of 3-toed jerboas. One of the things Talia wants to do is to take soil compaction measurements using a penetrometer. It’s not as dirty as it sounds. It’s basically a hand held tool that measures the amount of force it takes to press a small foot into the ground by a set amount. She’s been taking readings in all of the different locations and at the top and bottom of sand dunes and samples of the earth so that she can better understand the environment with which the jerboa feet are interacting as they bound along.

We had planned to visit another location last night, but we got distracted instead by camels. It’s just one of those times when you sacrifice a little bit of work for an amazing experience. A Kazakh family with a house by the roadside had about a half dozen baby goats that had lost their moms, so that was pretty cute to begin with. But then we rounded the corner of the house and walked over to where there were three mamma camels with their babies. Soooooooo painfully cute. They even have little baby humps. But a baby camel is no small fry. Each of these little guys was probably no more than a couple weeks old but already stood at about my shoulder. The mamma camels were a bit unpredictable, and I kept expecting to get clocked by a giant head suspended on a long neck. At one point, one of the gals started to walk toward me, but they each have a rope tied to one foot, so she accidentally stepped on the rope and managed to hobble herself. Good for me, because I think she had more than “hello” in mind.

This morning we went to make up for the lost hours last night and visited a couple of other jerboa capture sites. More camels! We had to wait for a whole herd at a camel crossing before we could continue on the road to a flat dry field where the 5-toed jerboas are supposedly prevalent. So once we had the lay of the land, we returned to the field station where everyone else took an afternoon siesta, and I got a little work done before we set out to lay some traps in a field near here. We will probably only catch sand rats (gerbils/jirds), but since Talia wants to compare bipedal and quadrupedal rodents, those are still useful.

After dinner this evening, we set out once more to a place where we were told there are both 5 and 3-toed jerboas. I walked along the top of the dune with my headlamp sweeping slowly in each direction and managed to see about a dozen 3-toed jerboas. Mostly though I just got good at spotting spiders since their eyes also glow in the light, but they’re much smaller than rodent eyes and kind of green in color. The jerboas are really quick though, so about all I got to appreciate was their escape maneuvering as their eyes bounced off into the distance. Fortunately my companions are a little quicker and managed to net a jerboa and a sand rat before we left that area. The driver was super helpful also. He stayed with the car, but every once in awhile he would flick on the headlights and change position so he could highlight animals for us. I think he finds this whole adventure to be funny and fun at the same time.

On our way out of the desert, along a dirt road, we saw a whole bunch more 3-toed jerboas, and Yang eagerly hopped out to chase them down. I think he wore himself out, but he was successful and caught another two jerboas before we left the desert. We then stopped at a place where there were supposed to be 5-toed jerboas but didn’t see any until we were leaving along a paved road and caught sight of them in the headlights of the car hopping down the road. The driver passed the first one by before realizing we wanted to stop and try to catch it, so he threw the car into reverse. I remember saying “it’ll be either gone or squished” not really expecting the latter until we once again passed it and saw the poor thing lying in the road. The good thing is that he didn’t feel anything for long, but I can’t understand why he didn’t hop out of the way. Fortunately we caught two more alive also along the road, so Talia now has some research subjects for her filming.

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Registration deadlines:

April 29 – Early registration and abstract submission deadline for the third meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology (EED)

April 30 – Registration deadline for Molecular & Cellular Basis of Regeneration & Tissue Repair (EMBO conference and BSDB Autumn Symposium)

May 28 – Early registration deadline for the SDB meeting
June 4 – late abstract submission deadline for the SDB meeting

[added 26/4] June 1 – Abstract submission deadline for the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology meeting.

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