This Month on the Node – July 2012

What was new on the Node this past month?

“Developments in development” essay competition
Congratulations to Joanna Asprer and Máté Varga, whose essays were selected by the judges in our recent essay competition. Read both essays on the Node, and then vote for your favourite. The final winning essay will be published in Development.
–An Excitingly Predictable ‘Omic Future – Joanna Asprer
–There’ll Be dragons? – The coming era of artificially altered development – Máté Varga

Research
Karuna Sampath’s lab has a paper out in the most recent issue of Development, and shares the backstory on the Node. They discovered that knockdown of squint affected dorsal axis formation in zebrafish, but their initial findings didn’t seem to match the prevailing knowledge about the role of squint, or even the stages at which it was expressed. “It seemed as though we were ascribing a function to an RNA no one else could see – it was The Emperor’s New Clothes of the zebrafish embryo!” writes Karuna, while graduate student Shimin Lim gives the student perspective in a second post: “… very soon, my project was shrouded with controversy. Colleagues in the field had challenged Aniket’s findings, and I was following up on his work.”
In their Node posts and the paper, Karuna and Shimin describe how they solved the puzzle to match both their new observations and the existing literature in the field. It’s a story of science in action!

Conferences and courses
This month we heard from Gi Fay Mok, who attended the 12th International Conference on Limb Development and Regeneration in Mont-Tremblant, Canada. It sounds like it was a great conference!

A few weeks later, developmental biologists gathered in Canada again, for the annual SDB meeting, which was held in Montreal this year. Patricia Gongal summarized the meeting’s highlights and we collected tweets from the conference on Storify.

We also received more updates from the Woods Hole Embryology Course. Priti wrote about making connections and meeting people while Manuela reflected on the course after it finished.

Meanwhile, there is currently an open voting round to choose a Development cover from these images from last year’s embryology course. Which image is your favourite?

Also on the Node
– Clare Cox reviewed the film “Stem Cell Revolutions”. This is an educational documentary about advances in stem cell research, produced by Amy Hardie and Clare Blackburn. Read Claire’s review, and then watch the documentary!

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