by Girish Kale and Niveda Udaykumar

Girish Kale, Lemke lab, Centre for Organismal Studies (COS), Heidelberg University, Heidelberg. Germany

I guess I am speaking for everyone when I say that the ISDB 2021 conference was a much-needed source of serendipity. Although postponed by a year, the conference brought together an excellent line-up of speakers with four keynote lectures, a Harrison medal lecture, a closing plenary lecture, along with 10 scientific symposia; all centered on developmental biology. It was a feast!! Oh, did I mention the nearly 400 posters? This is where we test the limits of how much knowledge one can acquire in a short amount of time.

In my view, this meeting was a great amalgamation of what we are doing, as a scientific community, to get a global understanding of the journey of life, starting from a single cell to the formation of the entire organism. Speaking of single cells; it became abundantly clear that single cell -omics techniques, like ‘single cell RNAseq’, are becoming mainstream bread-and-butter for understanding developmental processes. Each of the symposia I managed to attend had at least one talk where the technique was used to test and/or construct scientific hypotheses. We were joking that anyone playing a drinking-game, having to drink every time ‘single cell RNAseq’ was mentioned, would be, at the very least, unsafe for driving.

In the past, I have been skeptical about the utility of in vitro experiments in developmental systems: I mean, why would you use an in vitro cell/tissue culture system to understand what’s happening in vivo? in vivo systems are so beautiful to begin with!! I would say, this meeting changed my mind. For one, that’s probably the only way we can experiment with rhinoceros; but more importantly, I got the impression that we, as a scientific community, are reaching a critical mass of research and researchers who know the in-and-out of modelling in vivo processes in vitro. With organoids, gastruloids, axioloids, segmentoids, intestinoids, etc. leading the way, the era of -oids is upon us, and one can only imagine the endless possibilities it presents.

Here I have to mention a couple of personal highlights. The location: it was my first time at the Atlantic Ocean (I know I am a bit lazy that way), and this was one thing I am sure everyone at the meeting enjoyed thoroughly. A short walk from the beaches was a nature reserve that hosted flamingos, along with plenty of other interesting fauna. Also, meeting the speakers was a great opportunity to learn how one can shape their thinking to be a great scientist, as well as become an interesting human being. Exchanging ideas, while sitting on the lawn by the pool, made this one of the best meet-the-speakers session I have experienced.

Of course, the most natural thing that happens at conferences happened here as well, meeting old colleagues and friends, and making new connection with peers, despite all the corona-worries. Also, I hope every foodie got the opportunity to try out the amazing fish food in restaurants around the conference venue. I guess the conference organizers had realized the importance of networking, and pushed us to arrange for dinner on three out of five conference evenings, giving us additional social and informal bonding opportunities.

If you are curious about the study involving rhinoceros, and many other unpublished data, we have also compiled a list of various preprints discussed during the ISDB2021 meeting. So, feel free to check our preList for the meeting as well.

Niveda Udaykumar, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), Kanpur. India

This year’s ISDB meeting was one filled with exciting opportunities to dive into the fascinating field of developmental biology. I was looking forward to this conference from the moment I submitted my abstract!

My experience at this conference was very fulfilling with scientific and personal realizations. I have very fond memories and experiences of this conference, which was my first solo international trip!

I liked several aspects of this conference, the first being the diverse speaker line-up, from the Harrison Medal lecture, the Keystone lectures, symposium speakers, and the oral presentations. The line-up of speakers catered to the scientific interests of most of the attendees, if not all! The talks ranged from trying to recapitulate human somitogenesis in vitro to evo-devo and metabolism. I was impressed with the poster session, with about 400 posters that showcased exciting ideas and hypotheses from all around the world.

Another great aspect was the ample time for the participants to interact with each other. This time was particularly useful as I got to discuss my research with several people, get feedback and talk about potential future positions with PIs. On some days, this time was spent catching up with old colleagues and friends. I appreciated the organizers’ efforts in the networking sessions, ‘Meet the Speakers’, where the participants could interact with any speaker of their choice. The parallel session of ‘Meet the Editors’ too well-received, where the Editors of prominent journals such as ‘Development’ and ‘Cells and Development’ interacted with the participants and familiarized them with their potential manuscript submissions.

Finally, I felt that the choice of location for the conference was perfect. We were privileged to have clear beautiful blue skies with sunny weather on most days, and the serene beaches of the Algarve were breathtaking. As an attendee of the conference, I know that I came back home refreshed and motivated, caught up with old friends, and made new friends, and I thank the organizers for their efforts in organizing such a fantastic conference.

Girish and I (read mostly Girish) have prepared a preList of the preprints that were mentioned in the ISDB conference. Please take a look at it, and if we have missed any, please don’t hesitate to contact either of us.

(4 votes)

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There have been long-standing debates around the risk of selective serotonin uptake inhibitor (SSRI) use during pregnancy due to the potential effects on fetal brain development. Our studies, which have been recently published in Development, identify an essential role of transient serotonin uptake transporter (SERT) expression in non-serotonergic neurons during neural circuit development in the hippocampus, and disrupting this SERT function leads to sex-biased deficits in hippocampal electrophysiology and behaviors. This suggests that cataloguing the risks of SSRI exposure during particular timing of human fetal brain development could be critical to enhance the sensitivity of the investigations. Differences in cognitive behaviors in the male versus female mice imply that certain neural circuit dysfunctions, particularly in females, resulting from early life SSRI exposure may not manifest until later life and under certain environmental conditions. An outstanding question is how the findings in mouse models may help refine SSRI uses, to safeguard the mother and the offspring. We would appreciate comments and suggestions on our work.

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Over the last few months, I’ve been involved in a project coordinated by ASAPbio looking at the potential benefits of, and challenges with using, public preprint peer review – for researchers, funders and publishers. A meeting next month at the Janelia Campus (sponsored by HHMI, ASAPbio and EMBO) will bring together these diverse perspectives, with the aim of promoting community consensus and support for preprint peer review.

This meeting will be live-streamed and is open to anyone from the scientific community to engage with the meeting virtually. If you’re interested in finding out more, or want to sign up to attend, take a look at the meeting website.

Importantly, we really want to hear your experience of and thoughts on preprint feedback and review, through this survey. Responses to the survey will help shape the discussion at the meeting. It should only take 5 minutes to complete, so please do give us your input!

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“One of the things that we’re really interested in is whether or not we can take these genes that are used in carnivory and pop them into crop plants”

Dr Tanya Renner

In the latest episode of the Genetics Unzipped podcast, we’re looking at the gruesome world of plants eating animals. There’s something unnatural about carnivorous plants. We’re so used to plants being at the bottom of the food chain, that to see them trapping, killing and eating animals seems to go against the laws of nature. But of course, carnivory in plants is very real and has evolved multiple times in response to a lack of nutrients. We speak with Dr Ulrike Bauer about the biomechanics of how pitcher plants make their surfaces so slippery, Dr Kadeem Gilbert tells us about what is able to survive inside a pitcher plant’s death trap, and Dr Tanya Renner talks about how she’s trying to put sundew genes into crops.

Genetics Unzipped is the podcast from The Genetics Society. Full transcript, links and references available online at GeneticsUnzipped.com.

Subscribe from Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Head over to GeneticsUnzipped.com to catch up on our extensive back catalogue.

If you enjoy the show, please do rate and review on Apple podcasts and help to spread the word on social media. And you can always send feedback and suggestions for future episodes and guests to podcast@geneticsunzipped.com Follow us on Twitter – @geneticsunzip

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Royal Society Publishing has recently published a special issue of Philosophical Transactions B: Extraembryonic tissues: exploring concepts, definitions and functions across the animal kingdom

Compiled and edited by Guojun Sheng, Thorsten E Boroviak, Urs Schmidt-Ott and Shankar Srinivas, the articles can be accessed directly at  www.bit.ly/PTB1865 

A print version is also available at the special price of £35.00 per issue from sales@royalsociety.org

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Dear Node Colleagues,

This is my inaugural Node post. Around 1990, Stephen Jay Gould dedicated my copy of his Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1979), writing, “Thank you for tackling my real book.” As a chemical engineer, I took it seriously when Gould whispered that development is not encoded in the genes and to forget natural selection.

The succeeding thirty years of lab work by scientists and scientific artists attributing morphogenesis to mechanical causes has garnered many papers and hundreds of illustrations covering most complex taxa. Recently, we demonstrated vertebrate origins in self-organized patterns that occur in the predictable geometry of serial, sequential cell division.

The authors hope that the many facets of our work will inspire further investigation. We invite comments and possible collaboration.

Please see: www.embryogeometry.com 

Stuart Pivar 
Embryo Geometry Lab 

(7 votes)

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The Steinmetz group at the Sars Centre in Bergen (Norway) is looking for a bioinformatician with expertise in analysing high-throughput sequencing datasets (bulk, single-cell, ATAC-Seq). The project aims to characterise the transition from cellular quiescence to cell cycle re-entry, which is induced by re-feeding of starved animals, in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis.
Application deadline is November 25th 2022.
Link for more information and to apply for the position: https://tinyurl.com/yc43x7mc

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13–14 September 2022, University College London

The Symposium was organised by Alison Hawkes, Jonathan Slack, Jim Smith, Claudio Stern, Cheryll Tickle and Neil Vargesson. Kindly supported by the British Society for Developmental Biology, Oxford University Press and UCL.

To many readers of the Node, Lewis Wolpert, who died on 28^th January 2021, was above all a developmental biologist—one of the most distinguished and influential of his generation (Figure 1). But of course he was much more than this, and the organisers of this meeting in his memory devoted the first day to Lewis the man (Figure 2). We heard from his cousin Frances Jowell about his early life in South Africa, about his aunt Helen Suzman (the politician and anti-apartheid activist), and about Lewis’s own hatred of apartheid. Frances also explained how Lewis arrived in London, having hitch-hiked up Africa and spent some time working as a soil mechanic in Israel. Cheryll Tickle continued the story of Lewis’s early life by recounting how his friend Wilfred Stein introduced him to the mechanics of cell division and how this kindled his interest in developmental biology, leading to the articulation of the French Flag problem and his work on hydra and the chick limb.

Lewis was a charismatic speaker, performer, and communicator, and Jim Smith spoke about Lewis’s contributions to the public understanding of science, illustrating his points with clips from Wolpert’s Medawar lecture of 1999. He was followed by Robert McCrum, former editor-in-chief of Faber and Faber, who discussed Lewis’s writing, and then John Geddes, Professor of Psychiatry in Oxford, who explained how Lewis’s book on depression, Malignant Sadness, had had such an influence on both public understanding and on the field of mental health research. The day finished with Lewis’s stepson Luke Leitch speaking about Lewis’s forays into journalism, with Tim Arnett speaking about Lewis’s sporting life, and especially tennis on Parliament Hill Fields, and then with Lewis’s daughter Miranda speaking about Lewis at home. Finally, Nigel Townsend spoke about one of Lewis’s lesser-known activities, his support for the Y Touring theatre company, which produces plays that encourage schoolchildren to explore the social, moral, scientific, and political questions raised by areas such as stem cell research.

The second day of the meeting focussed on the science in which Wolpert was interested, and speakers included colleagues and collaborators as well as young scientists who had been influenced by Lewis and his work, many of whom said how much they would have liked to have met him. The speakers would have graced any major scientific meeting, and included Claudio Stern, Maria Leptin, Alfonso Martinez-Arias, Lara Busby (recipient of the Summerbell award and introduced by Amata Hornbruch), Cliff Tabin, Neil Vargesson (Lewis’s last PhD student), James Sharpe, Kristina Stapornwongkul, Brigitte Galliot, Elly Tanaka, Peter Holland and Denis Duboule (Figure 3). Areas of research included gastrulation, limb development, modelling, regeneration and evolution, and each speaker described how Lewis had influenced their work and their thinking.

The Symposium made clear Lewis’s influence on the field of developmental biology, his ability to transcend his field and, through his charismatic performances, his power to inspire and inform both scientists and non-scientists. When video clips of him were played at the end of the first day, the audience leant forward as one, listening intently to what he had to say. We also heard that Lewis loved discussing science, especially with the young, and was never slow to explain exactly what your data really meant. As a self-confessed ‘contradictor’ he was always questioning and challenging others, encouraging them to think more deeply about their views and why they differed from his!

We’d like to think Lewis would have enjoyed the meeting. He would have been pleased that his ideas are still informing our experiments and he would have asked lots of questions (something he always asked his PhD students to do). Most importantly, we think he would have been pleased by the great affection in which he was held, and by how pleased we all are that he made the move from soil mechanics to developmental biology.

Neil Vargesson and Jim Smith

(6 votes)

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5 simple tips to make sure people love rather than loathe your next presentation.

All too often you find yourself in the audience, watching a scientific presentation with a fully-scrunched grimacing face as you despair slightly at the torrent of PowerPoint slides being projected into your eyeholes. 

Whether it’s the classic forty slides for a ten-minute talk, the essay being read aloud to you or the dreaded illegible yellow text, presentation disasters are everywhere. 

But it doesn’t have to be like this. You can break the trend. You can be better. You just have to follow a few simple rules.

1. Tell a story

This is super clichéd, but it still seems to be rarer than a paper returned without revisions. You have to tell your audience a story. Have a clear beginning, middle and end. Don’t just rattle through every single experiment you’ve done over the past few months and bombard your audience with every shred of data: tell them a story. Bring them along for the emotional ride we all know lab work is. Research is full of ups and downs, repetitive little failures and surprise successes. Expand on those. Tell people what you were hoping for, what you ended up with and how you felt about that. 

When it comes to crafting your science story, here are some helpful prompts:

• What’s the question or problem you’re addressing?
• Why should anyone care?
• What did you do to answer that question?
• Were there problems you had to overcome? How did you manage that? (People love a tale of conquered adversity)
• Got data? Awesome! What are the main findings?
• No data? Awesome? Here’s your chance to open the floor up to troubleshooting (Okay okay, I know it’s not awesome but quite often you’re going to lack data, so here’s a chance to explain what you did and I bet there’s someone who has an idea about why didn’t get the data you expected. Also, unexpected data are the basis of discovery — remember that).
• If you’ve thought about what research comes next, leave people with a taster of what you have planned. They’ll be excited by the prospect of a sequel – who doesn’t love a sequel? 
• And what did you conclude from all this amazing work? Wrap it up in one slide. ONE SLIDE — YEAH YOU HEARD! ONE SINGLE SLIDE.

2. Keep it minimal

This is not your thesis — do not have a ton of text on your slides. You’ll just end up reading it aloud and the audience won’t be listening to you because they’ll either be reading the essay you slapped in front of them or on their phones tweeting about the terrible talk they’re stuck in. 

Instead, have a title, a few supporting bullet points and a visual. Talk about what’s on each slide: explain graphs, images and diagrams. You know the data inside out but your audience doesn’t. So walk people through your thinking. Explain what it all means – it keeps them engaged and actively listening to you.

3. Make it pretty

This isn’t superficial: it matters. If your text changes size on every slide, your titles are in a new position every time you hit ‘next’ and your images are blurry, people will be distracted. 

An aesthetically pleasing, neat and well-formatted (i.e., consistent!) presentation helps to keep people focused on what you’re saying. It also says you care about the experience of the people looking at your work. 

The layout of a pretty presentation may go unnoticed, but the layout of an eye-wateringly ugly presentation is often the only thing people will see.

BONUS PRO POINTS: skip slides altogether. Everyone hates PowerPoint really, so bin it. Rise above it. Try giving your talk with just a blackboard or whiteboard. Stand in front of it. Gesticulate wildly. Draw the data you need to enhance your points. Tell your story. Own that board! This means you really need to know your stuff. But you do. Right? Be the blackboard talk person that everyone remembers.

4. Have a point

This ties in with my first rule about telling a story, but it’s worth reiterating. 

What’s the point of your presentation? 

Are you talking about one key new finding? 

Summing up your last six months of work? 

Presenting a problem that you hope to troubleshoot? 

Whatever it is, make it the focus of your presentation; don’t try to do everything at once. Again, this isn’t your thesis. You want to leave people with a clear take-home message. You don’t want them coming out, scratching their heads, wondering what just happened and if they can somehow reclaim the last hour of their lives.

5. Be a human

Presentations can be daunting, but if you relax and learn to present with a little bit of personality, maybe even some humour, you’ll find they go a lot smoother. 

Take your time. Take longer than you think you need. 

Breathe. 

Think about the points you’re making. Talk to your audience like you would a friend in the office or the lab. There’s no need to plough through a talk, eyes down, like a robot reading a script.

Get excited by your results. Get exasperated by your failures. A little bit of empathy goes a long way. You can be sure almost everyone in that audience has been through a similar experience, so sharing your feelings here gets them on board. They’ll care. And if they care, they’ll listen and remember your talk. 

You might even find you actually end up enjoying it because, all of a sudden, people are enjoying your talk! You’re the expert! And you’re crushing it!

Okay, you got all that? Here’s a summary just in case:

• Tell a story with a beginning, middle and end — keep people engaged
• Only include essential info on your slides
• Make your presentation pretty and consistent
• Address one main point
• Be a human — be a friendly, potentially entertaining, human if at all possible

There you go: just a few simple rules to make sure your presentations don’t inadvertently bore people to death.

For articles about science and science writing, check out Bill’s blog at https://medium.com/@billhinchen. You can also find Bill on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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By David Christensen

At the Mary Lyon Centre at MRC Harwell we have our 10^th Genome Editing Mice for Medicine (GEMM) call open and accepting applications, so we decided it would be a good opportunity to look back at genetically altered mouse lines generated for successful applicants from previous funding calls. We have created some case studies that demonstrate the range of work we have supported and highlight some of the lines that we have available for the scientific community

The GEMM programme offers the expertise and resources required to deliver and validate new and innovative mouse models that contribute to answering vital, pertinent scientific and clinical questions that can only be answered by the use of an in vivo model. Successful applicants demonstrating the scientific and clinical importance of their desired model have their novel mouse line designed and produced free of charge and made available to the scientific community. The first call for applications was made in 2016 and, so far, more than 80 novel genetically altered mouse lines have been generated.

One example line is C57BL/6NTac-Gldc^em1H/H, which contains a disease-associated point mutation created by CRISPR/Cas9 in the gene GLDC.

Glycine decarboxylase (GLDC) is one of four enzymes that make up the glycine cleavage system (GCS), a complex that regulates the abundance of the amino acid and neurotransmitter glycine. This is done by catabolising glycine to release carbon dioxide and transfer a one-carbon unit into mitochondrial folate one-carbon metabolism. Mutations in GLDC have been found in patients with a severe inherited metabolic disease, Non-Ketotic Hyperglycinemia (NKH) and neural tube defects (NTDs). GLDC has also been found to be highly expressed in some cancers and it’s thought that sensitivity to GCS inhibition might provide a therapeutic strategy. Triplication of GLDC has been seen in bipolar/schizoaffective disorder, likely due to low levels of glycine impacting its role as a neurotransmitter.

NKH is a rare, life-limiting inherited metabolic disease characterised by accumulation of excess glycine in the body fluids and tissues. It becomes apparent soon after birth with lethargy, breathing difficulties, and neurological symptoms, including seizures. Affected individuals suffer epilepsy and profound delay in development. More than 80% of patients with NKH carry mutations in GLDC. NTDs are severe birth defects of the developing nervous system that affect 1 in 1,000 pregnancies worldwide. Due to the importance of folate for brain development, disruption of folate metabolism is implicated in causing NTDs and folic acid supplements can prevent some, but not all NTDs. The GLDC missense mutation S951Y has been identified both in patients with NKH and with NTDs.

To provide a pre-clinical model for these diseases, Nick Greene, a group leader at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, applied to the GEMM programme to generate a mouse model for the S951Y variant (S956Y in mice). He and his team were then able to generate mice carrying the S956Y variant in combination with a deleted copy of GLDC, as a means to genetically copy the combination of variants present in an NKH patient. Using this model, they were recently able to show mild but significant elevation of plasma glycine, suggesting that the mutant protein retains some function, when compared with the glycine elevation seen in a knockout model. Despite only mild elevation of plasma glycine, there was still significant glycine accumulation in the brain, as well as a trend towards accumulation of related compounds that are also thought to cause epilepsy. Importantly, they were also able to demonstrate that glycine levels in the brain could be normalised by activation of glycine conjugation via administration of cinnamate, which could suggest a future therapy.

Prof Greene’s team plan to use the model to test disease treatments, including via gene therapy, and the model could also be useful for testing of putative genetic interactions with “second hit” variants that may increase the likelihood of NTDs.

This line and all others generated through the GEMM programme are available through the National Mouse Archive, here at MRC Harwell, and through the European Mouse Mutant Archive (EMMA).

We are currently accepting applications for the 10^th GEMM call and invite you to nominate ideas and designs for your own genetically altered mouse lines.

Application Deadline: 2^nd December 2022

Find out more and apply!

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