Here is the final part of my meeting report on the BSDB-BSCB Spring Conference this April in Warwick. In the first part, I covered some of the talks on transcriptional regulation, and in part two I gave a brief overview on recent attempts to decipher large-scale transcription factor networks. In this final part I will touch on several seemingly unrelated subjects, which reflects how difficult it was for us developmental biologists to make choices between some of the parallel sessions: the BSCB’s stem cell sessions and the BSDB’s limb development and “evo-devo” sessions.

In one of the stem cell sessions, Austin Smith (Centre for Stem Cell Research, Cambridge, UK) emphasized the artificial nature of cultured embryonic stem (ES) cells and how the previously empirically determined requirements to maintain these cells do not reflect minimal requirements. Supply of these factors, such as specific sera, might even be counterproductive in maintaining the pluripotent state, since they contain many inductive stimuli. His lab has established that specific inhibition of the MEK/ERK cascade and GSK3 simultaneously is sufficient to provide optimal conditions for ES cell derivation and maintenance from all mouse strains and even from rats.

Kevin Eggan (Harvard University, USA) and his group have succeeded in reprogramming skin cells of patients suffering from either inherited or sporadic instances of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) into pluripotent stem cells. They were then able to differentiate these patient-specific induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into spinal motor neurons and glia, the cell types affected in the disease. Now they are comparing the behavior of these cells to that of the corresponding cell types generated from skin cells of healthy individuals, attempting to uncover the molecular mechanisms underlying ALS.

Of the limb development session I will only cover Richard Behringer‘s (University of Texas, Houston, USA) talk, since I did a bit of session hopping at that time. He presented their work on forelimb development in the bat, where they identified Paired-related homeobox 1 (Prx1) as a promising candidate underlying limb diversification between mouse and bat. In mice, they replaced the Prx1 enhancer with that of the bat, and observed a significant increase in both the length of the forelimb and the levels of Prx1 mRNA. In the second part of his talk, Behringer described their experiments in which they expressed a human HoxB1-9 transgene in a HoxB1-9 knockout mouse. This resulted in almost complete rescue of the knockout phenotype. Interestingly, the presence of the human transgene had a dominant effect in either wildtype or mutant mice: Only 5 sacral vertebrae rather than 6 formed, which might be the result of a shift of the expression boundary of HOXB9 in human compared to the mouse.

After first making a case for the need of new model organisms by presenting his group’s work on germline formation in the beach hopper Parhyale hawaiensis, Nipam Patel (University of California, Berkeley, USA) described how he has been using Google’s search engine to collect about 3000 examples of mosaic butterfly gynandromorphs, which show regions of both male and female characteristic patterns in the same wing. He observed that these naturally occurring clones do not cross a certain boundary, which is distinct from the boundary separating the classical anterior and posterior compartments defined in Drosophila. They were able to experimentally trace the origin of this unexpected compartment back to embryonic development. This so-called S compartment is also present in Drosophila, albeit in a very thin line. The studies Patel presented demonstrated how much there still is to learn in developmental evolution, and how the usage of unconventional model organisms can unmask unknown processes, which might be more concealed in our traditional systems.

Kristin Tessmar-Raible (University of Vienna, Austria) presented the unusual organism and topic her team works on: They use the annelid worm Platynereis dumerilii to study lunar rhythms, which synchronize spawning in these animals. In a series of experiments using entrainment and expression profiling of candidate genes, they identified the core set of genes of the lunar clock. Interestingly, the circadian and lunar clocks seem to regulate the same subsets of genes. A group of photosensory-neurosecretory cells of the inner medial forebrain of this species has recently been shown to represent the ancient core of vertebrate and invertebrate brains, and Tessmar-Raible’s group is now investigating whether and how these cells are involved in regulating the clocks.

Finally I’d like to mention the BSDB’s Waddington Medal, which is awarded annually at the spring meeting to a developmental biologist for their outstanding research performance and services to the subject community. This year it went to Robin Lovell-Badge (NIMR, London, UK), for his research on sex determination, stem cells and the development of the nervous system. He gave a highly entertaining lecture on the important steps in his life and career, including video coverage from his childhood and pictures of the various cars he has owned over the years.

I thoroughly enjoyed the meeting, especially due to the wide range of subjects it covered. So I’m looking forward to attending next year’s spring meeting, which will be announced here.

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Does anyone know a protocol for rehydrating embryos once stored in methanol?  I’m working with Xenopus laevis embryos which have been fixed using formaldehyde.  Some lab wisdom passed down is “wash into a 50:50 solution of 1xPBS and methanol; then into 1xPBS; then into methanol again (which we’re a bit confused by); then into 50:50 PBS: methanol; and finally 1xPBS”.

Any help would be much appreciated!

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Yes, we’ve been live for a few weeks, but you’re not truly and fully launched as a website these days without a proper launch party, so we had ours last night in Cambridge (UK).

The Gurdon Institute was kind enough to open their doors to us, and we invited all of their labs as well as other local developmental biologists to join The Company of Biologists and Development for some celebratory champagne and canapés. We were also joined by representatives from the Journal of Cell Science, Nature Cell Biology, PLoS Biology, F1000/The Scientist, and Nature Network Cambridge.

With the Node projected on screen, and three laptops available to browse the site, we had a unique chance to show people around the site in person, and got some useful feedback and suggestions as well.

Several people registered on the Node during or after last night’s event. Welcome! We hope you (and all other new registrants) will use the Node to read and share, and that you had a good time yesterday!

Now the party is over, the leftover canapés have been consumed by our colleagues back at the office, and it’s back to regularly scheduled Node posting and reading. The sad thing about launching is that you can do it only once!

The Company of Biologists’ publisher Claire Moulton, with Company directors and Cambridge researchers John Gurdon and Daniel St Johnston.

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Using light microscopy to study developmental processes in situ is a bit tricky if your samples are not transparent. In that aspect, early zebrafish development is a walk in the park compared to studying non-transparent fly embryos, or even fish in a later stage of development.

But research published in Nature Methods this week comes with a solution. Thanks to Philipp Keller and his colleagues, it’s now possible to take very clear images of non-transparent samples, such as Drosophila embryos, or to monitor zebrafish development much longer – up to three days. This has produced a database of detailed images and movies of Drosophila embryo development.

A few years ago, the group developed a technique called digital scanned laser light sheet fluorescence microscopy (DSLM), in which a laser beam illuminates a slice of the sample, and a detector records fluorescence of just that slice. But that produced a very noisy signal in the presence of many refractive cell membranes – in other words, with non-transparent samples. To solve this problem, they changed the laser beam properties: Instead of a continuous beam of light, the signal was pulsed. By combining multiple pulsed images of the same section, the signal and noise were easier to distinguish, which led to a much clearer image.

How clear exactly? To test the new system (DSLM-SI), Keller monitored zebrafish development up to three days. Compared to studies done with traditional methods, he could see far more detail, including eye and midbrain development. When using DSLM-SI, they were also able to collect very detailed information of cell positions over time in a Drosophila embryo, and combined this information into a dataset with 1.5 nucleus data entries. You can see the resulting dataset, images, and movies on the digital embryo website.

Fore more information, see the EMBL press release, or the original paper.

(image via EMBL, courtesy of Philipp Keller and EMBL.)

(Read an interesting paper about developmental biology lately? Let us know on the Node!)

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Almost four thousand people attended the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) meeting in San Francisco in June. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, about a quarter of the attendees were from California, but other participants traveled from Australia, Europe, and Asia to attend the meeting. There were far too many talks to summarize the entire event, but Development’s new Reviews Editor, Seema Grewal, and I have selected some of the ones that we thought you might find interesting. Where we found a published paper related to the same topic, we’ve linked to the PubMed abstract, so you can look up more information.

Unfortunately (due to a late flight!) we missed the entire first day of the conference, but if you were there, please let us know what you thought of the talks on that day!
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Ahhh the Node, my favourite part of the embryo: nice cup shape you can lie back in and get a whirly cilia massage…. OK, on with the post.

So it seems that everyone is working on stem cells now. They’re all the rage. Students come through for a rotation and ask “do you work on stem cells?”, grants with some aim that includes stem cells seem to do better than regular dev bio grants, and of course the papers….well the papers speak for themselves. But is this such a surprise and does this have any bearing on those of us who study embryonic development but haven’t cultured a stem cell other than maybe to make a knockout mouse? The answer is that it depends what you care to study, and whether you care if there is a difference between the two.

Because really stem cell biology is but an integral part of developmental biology. Stem cells, especially the non-cultured variety, are a normal part of embryonic development (or in the case of cancer stem cells, a rather unfortunate return). Isolating and culturing these stem cells is really figuring out how to freeze them in that transient state. In fact one might as well call development embryonic stem cell allocation (or something more clever). Most of you don’t need convincing, as many of the giants in stem cell biology were first giants in developmental biology (Rossant, Melton, Martin, Keller, and so on), and they simply applied the principles of embryology that they had developed to isolate the specific cell types that do their thing in the embryo. Not really simple, but you get the point.

When there were no stem cell journals, papers on stem cells or progenitors were published in development journals. Now of course we still have developmental biology journals, but a flurry of stem cell-specific journals have appeared, some bearing influential imprints, and these have done very well. I do however like the new trend, espoused recently by Development, of enthusiastically marrying back the two fields, like a happy homecoming or two good friends who parted ways years ago. It’s natural, it makes sense, and it certainly fits with what is hot right now in stem cell biology, which is helping stem cells find a path to a particular lineage and coax them become the cell type you wish to have in the dish. Sound familiar? Indeed the reverse trend is also taking place, with the stem cell journals publishing papers with a very developmental angle.

Of course the promise of therapeutics that stem cells bring distinguishes part of that field from developmental biology, but that’s the reason for it, often not the actual research that goes behind it. (Although the irony is that perhaps developmental biology’s fruits will severely diminish the therapeutic potential of stem cells: who needs the chance of a teratoma when you can just reprogram that skin cell straight into a nice neuron? )

So good friends meet again, hang out for a while, get to know each other again. As stem cell biology advances along lineage paths, and developmental biology takes a dip in the stem cell pool, we will do this with the comforting thought that we’re all doing the same thing: discovering where we come from and how we got here.

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This is a question that I keep asking myself. I am starting work on the third edition of my textbook “Essential Developmental Biology”. Over the years the quantity of published material in developmental biology keeps rising exponentially. Papers nowadays are extremely detailed and technical compared to the way they were in the 1980s when the shape of current molecular-genetic developmental biology was being established.

People always tell me that the thing they like about my books is their brevity and conciseness. But brevity can’t be maintained without being extremely selective, and this inevitably offends people whose research topics get left out.

Suppose an undergraduate (or beginning graduate student) has taken a lecture course in developmental biology, comprising maybe 40 hours of contact. What do you expect them to know when they appear in your lab as a PhD student ?

Do they need to know about sea urchin as well as mouse fertilization ?

Zebrafish pancreas development as well as mouse pancreas development ?

Enhancer traps in mouse as well as Drosophila ?

Would you expect them to know what the amnion is ? What are the properties of neuronal stem cells ? Which end of a Hydra is the head ? Anything about Dictyostelium ?

Or none of the above…?

Is there areally a core set of principles of Developmental Biology as a science, or is it just a bunch of topics that can be varied without limit depending on the interests of the instructor ?

If anyone has comments on this matter, and particularly about what they would like to see included in, or left out of, my third edition, please let me know.

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Have you ever met a Nobel Laureate? 650 lucky young researchers are currently spending the week with 59 previous Nobel Prize winners from the fields of physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry. Each year, a group of Nobel Laureates meet in Lindau, a German town (and island) at Lake Constance, close to the Swiss and Austrian borders. They share ideas from their respective fields with each other, and with a selection of young researchers.

The young scientists that are accepted to attend the meeting have undergone a rigorous selection process, and about forty thousand applied to fight for the 650 spots. If that sounds like a difficult way to get invited to attend a meeting, remember that the selection process for the speakers was even harder: they have to already have a Nobel Prize!

The meeting programme is a dizzying collection of big names from all areas of science. Developmental biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard presented yesterday (pictured) in the same session as climate scientist Paul Crutzen. Different fields, and speakers you would not normally find at the same meeting, but the goal of this meeting is to cross disciplinary boundaries.

For those of us not at Lindau, there are plenty of ways to keep up with what’s going on via the web. The most convenient way to follow the meeting while it going on is through the special meeting website run by Nature and Spektrum, who have a team of bloggers present at the meeting. The page also aggregates all Twitter activity and photos related to the meeting, displays video interviews, and links to live streams of the lectures. Another good site to visit – even after the meeting is over – is the official Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting website itself, which contains information about the format and history of the event.

The reports coming out of Lindau this week make it sound like an amazing event. I wonder how many of the young researchers who got to attend will later go on to win a Nobel Prize – even if just to be invited again!

(Photo of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard speaking at the meeting, by gedankenstuecke on Flickr.)

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Biomedical researchers in the UK are seeing some changes in the way their research is funded. The Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest charity funding agency for biomedical research, is phasing out the majority of its existing biomedical science grants and replacing them with “Investigator Awards”.

The last applications for project grants, programme grants, equipment grants, biomedical resources grants, technology development grants, university awards, and flexible travel awards are due on July 30 2010. After that date, researchers who would normally apply for any of these grants now need to look into the application process for Investigator Awards (starting October 2010), which is a bit different.

There will be two types of Investigator Awards: one for New Investigators, who have recently been appointed to their first academic post, and one for Senior Investigators. In a long FAQ page, the Wellcome Trust answers a lot of questions people may have about the scheme. If you’re thinking of applying for one of the new grants, that’s a page you should definitely read.

Is anyone in the UK currently preparing to apply for these grants? Or hurrying to get in an application for the old grants that are being phased out? Let us know what you think of the changes, and good luck with all your applications!

(And if there are any recent changes in research funding in your country, feel free to post an update to the Node.)

Photo credit: Dave McClear on Flickr.

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Coinciding with the launch of the Node, Development Editor-in-chief Olivier Pourquié, Executive editor Jane Alfred, and the Node’s Community Manager Eva Amsen (that’s me!) wrote an editorial for the current issue of Development. It explains why we set up this site, and who is writing and reading it (that’s you!).

The picture I added is of our Node banner, which travels around a bit to conferences and other places where we want to promote the Node. It’s now back in Cambridge, where it will visit the Gurdon Institute in less than two weeks – but you will hear more about that later. Here is the editorial:

Development is excited to announce the launch of a new community website for all biologists interested in developmental biology, called the Node: a place where the developmental biology community can discuss, debate and deliberate issues relevant to developmental biology and to other research fields that this community’s work informs and touches upon.

In 2009, to assist with the recruitment of our new Editor in Chief, Olivier Pourquié, Development asked many of you in the developmental biology community for your feedback on the journal and whether there was anything about it you would change.

Your response?
Amongst other things, you told us that we needed to improve our website. And we did. In January 2010, we launched Development’s new-look website at dev.biologists.org, featuring a new design, new navigation tools and functionality, and new online-only features. But there was also a consensus amongst the community that you wanted your community journal, Development, to be just that: an online place where you could interact, gossip, write about what was going on in your world and share news about jobs, research advances and events; somewhere that would be a community-based, one-stop shop for developmental biologists.

Our answer? The Node
The Node is a new not-for-profit community website for developmental biologists, which is being launched by Development. At its helm is Eva Amsen, Development‘s Online Editor and the Node’s Community Manager, who is an active science blogger and writer with a track record in community building, and at its heart is a blog that will be open to the community. All that community members need to do to participate on the Node is to register, be approved by Eva and you are then free to post your news on the site. In addition, anyone can leave comments on any of the posts. We will be posting too: news about top research published in Development and in other community journals; deadlines and updates for conferences and funding programmes; reports from conferences we are attending; interviews with our Editors and authors; as well as other posts of general relevance and interest to the community. Sometimes we will invite specific people to contribute something on a particular topic, but we do want everyone in the community to feel free to sign up and contribute something spontaneously. Nobody knows better what is going on in the world of developmental biology than the people actively doing the research, so we’re happy to give you a chance to address your colleagues directly by signing up for the Node and posting your news and events.

So will you participate?
This is the million-dollar question because the Node will only flourish and grow if you, the community, participate. The Node is entirely funded by Development‘s not-for-profit publisher, The Company of Biologists, as a service to the community, but we’re inviting all of you to contribute content. There are already many interesting posts on the Node, which we encourage you to go and browse. This is because some of the community have been kindly helping us to road test and develop the site over the past few months and have also written some great posts for the site’s launch. For example, you can find tips for blogging from conferences, learn about some useful online science communication tools, read updates of some hot new papers in the field, catch up on presentations at the British Society for Developmental Biology conference and find out about how two of Development‘s travelling fellowship recipients are faring in their host labs in Germany and India.

To keep up with what’s new on the Node, you can bookmark the site, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or look at the regularly updated highlights from the Node featured on Development‘s homepage.

We hope and believe that you will grow to like the Node. You can think of the Node as a coffee break, and use it to catch up with other scientists, to find out what’s new in the field. When you’re done, you can get right back to work by using the links in the Node’s sidebars to navigate to recent papers, your favourite databases and community journals, or find out more about upcoming conferences. We’ve already received some great feedback on the Node: when we demonstrated it to the community at the recent British Society for Developmental Biology conference in March, the community’s response was overwhelmingly positive, with several of you asking ‘why hasn’t this been done before?!’, which we took to be a good sign.

The Node is your community website, not ours, so please sign up, join in and enjoy. And if you like it, tell your colleagues and collaborators. And most of all, share your thoughts and feedback with us at the Node.

(1 votes)

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