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European Developmental Biology Congress 2023
A distributed meeting across Oxford, Barcelona and Paris
An obituary has now been published in Development, commemorating the life and work of Jeff Williams. We would like to thank Rob Kay and Kees Weijer for preparing this summary of Jeff’s contributions to our scientific field and society
Join us, on-line or in person, for two days of talks celebrating Lewis’s extraordinary life and achievements, beginning with Lewis the man and continuing with his scientific contributions. The meeting is supported by the British Society for Developmental Biology.
Tuesday 13 September, 2022
Chair: TBD
1.30 – 1.45 Miranda Wolpert and Alison Hawkes: Welcome
1:50 – 2:05 Frances Jowell: Lewis in South Africa
2:10 – 2.25 Cheryll Tickle: Lewis and science
2.30 – 2.45 TBC: Lewis and the understanding of science
2:50 – 3.05 John Geddes: Lewis and depression
3.10 – 3.25 Robert McCrum: Lewis’s books
3:25 – 3.55 Tea
Chair: TBD
4.00 – 4.15 Luke Leitch: Lewis and journalism
4:20 – 4.30 Tim Arnett: Lewis the sportsman
4.35 – 4.50 Miranda Wolpert: Lewis at home
4.55 – 5.05 Nigel Townsend: Lewis and Y Touring
5.10 – 5.30 Finale
5.30 – 6.30 Tea
Wednesday 14 September, 2022
Gastrulation and morphogenesis (chair: Jonathan Slack)
09.00 – 09.25 Claudio Stern
09.30 – 09.55 Maria Leptin
10.00 – 10.25 Alfonso Martinez-Arias (The Oxford University Press lecture)
10.30 – 10.45 Dennis Summerbell Prize Lecture – Lara Busby – Introduced by Amata Hornbruch
10.45 – 11.10 Coffee
Limb development and theoretical modelling (chair: Brigid Hogan)
11.10 – 11.35 Cliff Tabin
11.40 – 12.05 Neil Vargesson
12.10 – 12.35 James Sharpe (The UCL CDB Lewis Wolpert Memorial Lecture)
12.40 – 13.05 Kristina Stapornwongkul
13.05 – 14.05 Lunch
Regeneration and evolution (chair: Jim Smith)
14.05 – 14.30 Brigitte Galliot
14.35 – 15.00 Elly Tanaka
15.05 – 15.30 Peter Holland
15.35 – 16.00 Denis Duboule
16.00 Tea
Alison Hawkes
Jonathan Slack
Jim Smith
Claudio Stern
Cheryll Tickle
Neil Vargesson
BSDB/BSCB Joint Annual Spring Meeting 2022
I started my PhD in the middle of the pandemic, so my first year was dominated by online meetings including a hybrid conference that I could only join from my study at home. After all those lonely meetings, the BSDB/BSCB 2022 Joint Annual Spring Meeting at the Warwick University Arts Centre felt incredibly welcoming to me as a “first-timer”, but I certainly was not alone with this impression. It seemed like everyone enjoyed finally being in the middle of a vibrant research community again. The sense of belonging was omnipresent throughout the conference; from the team spirit at the Student & Post-Doc Social through the lively discussions during the two Poster Sessions, to the talks where the speakers picked up on phrases of other speakers, such as the “ignorome”, mentioned in the Opening Plenary by John Wallingford. This was the sharpest contrast to virtual conferences, as it created an entirely different experience where people came together in the coffee breaks to share ideas and engage in heated discussions, as well as allowing time to casually chat with experts about problems we are facing in our projects.
The organising committee decided to not just simply return to the pre-pandemic setting of the Spring Meeting but invested a great amount of effort into building a hybrid conference by providing a user-friendly virtual platform for people joining from anywhere in the world.
This hybrid format offered two great advantages: First, speakers like Jesse Veenvliet and Tickle Medal winner Emma Rawlins could give their talks virtually, which would not have felt so normal to everyone before the pandemic; and second, I can now watch the recordings of the talks I missed due to parallel sessions, like Shane Herbert’s unravelling of the role of cell shape for morphogenesis and Marika Charalambous’ work on endocrine communication between mother and foetus. In addition, the platform enables me to re-watch talks I enjoyed most, for example, Anne Spang’s kiss-and-run mechanism on sorting endosomes and Hugh Ford’s mesmerising videos of spiralling Dictyostelium amoebas.
“The BSDB/BSCB spring meeting online did much to make up for the disappointment of being stuck at home with Covid. The schedule was easy to follow and the streaming worked smoothly, allowing me to easily jump between sessions (an advantage of being online!). How to recreate in-person socialising online remains a major hurdle in hybrid conferencing, and I certainly felt the absence of being able to chat with people over coffee. But being able to see the presentation and the speaker at the same time, as well as asking questions through Slido, really helped with being immersed in the action of the talks themselves. Overall a good experience!”
The excellent selection of talks from developmental and cell biology catered to a broad range of interests and often spun the arc between both fields as demonstrated by the “plant person” Dolf Weijers with convergent proteins coordinating cell polarity in development.
Besides showcasing cutting-edge science, the conference also offered reflection on the different stages of an academic career. The Beddington Medal for the best PhD thesis was awarded to Guillermo Serrano Najera, mid-career Emma Rawlins received the Cheryll Tickle Medal and Andreas Prokop the Wolpert Medal for outstanding teaching and communication, and Val Wilson’s major contributions to developmental biology were honoured with the prestigious Waddington Medal. The medal winner talks, especially the Waddington lecture, demonstrated how much great science relies on the work of many ambitious people who in this case contributed to unravelling the complex processes of development. And anyone overwhelmed by the achievements of the four medal winners had the opportunity to chat with twelve exhibitors about a potential career in industry or scientific publishing.
“I’ve always enjoyed BSDB meetings, but this year was particularly special – I hadn’t realised how much I had missed the energy and excitement of in-person conferences. Being in an auditorium and hearing hundreds of people chatting/clapping was quite something! The science was fantastic, such a breadth and diversity of topics – my favourite part was the poster session- exciting to see more and more quantitative methods being used in devbio”.
Finally, after the four-day Spring Meeting, I look forward to leaving my study again to head to the lab and get started on new ideas for my experiments, and to attend a seminar in person for a change rather than joining online.
Written by Tamina Lebek (University of Edinburgh)
The Beddington Medal is the BSDB’s major commendation to promising young biologists, awarded for the best PhD thesis in Developmental Biology defended in the year previous to the award. Rosa Beddington was one of the greatest talents and inspirational leaders in the field of developmental biology. Rosa made an enormous contribution to the field in general and to the BSDB in particular, so it seemed entirely appropriate that the Society should establish a lasting memorial to her. The design of the medal, mice on a stylised DNA helix, is from artwork by Rosa herself.
Like many years, it was a tough decision for the BSBD committee to choose a winner for the 2022 Beddington medal. We are pleased to announce that this goes to Guillermo Serrano Najera, for his PhD work at the University of Dundee on chick gastrulation.
Guillermo brings to his work huge range of expertise and approaches, that together have enabled him to produce an outstanding PhD thesis. The central core of his work was aimed at understanding how the balance of different cellular behaviours can drive coordinated morphogenesis at the whole embryo level during chick gastrulation. He discovered that two essential parameters are sufficient to generate modes of gastrulation evident in cross-species comparisons of gastrulation in a range of vertebrates: the size and shape of mesoderm specification, and the presence of absence of EMT in the control of cell ingression. This discovery depended on the use system-wide live imaging and analysis to probe the full range of cell behaviours appearing in response to chemical inhibition of key pathways controlling early development. To achieve this, Guillermo developed and enhanced computational pipelines to deal with large (+TB) imaging datasets and extract the relevant parameters for his downstream analysis.
The next step in his work was to be able to probe his imaging datasets to determine regions where the embryo undergoes changes in the rates of compaction, expansion, and strain with respect to neighbouring regions. For this, he applied particle image velocimetry (PIV) analysis, a method that could compliment the physical modelling of the process by his collaborator Mattia Serra, in the Mahadevan lab at Harvard. He was also able to analyse individual cell behaviours directly in his datasets through the application of cell segmentation and tracking tools. A second independent project was developed where Guillermo was able to demonstrate previously unstudied bursts of cell ingression anterior to the primitive streak.
In what Guillermo describes as his ‘lockdown project’, when unable to get into the lab for his imaging experiments, a very distinct line of research took him to better understanding of how eusociality evolved in the Naked mole-rat. Eusociality is a social organisation typically associated with insects (Bees, Ants, termites) where most members renounce to reproduce, and specialise in activities that serve the community, such as digging, defence and pup-caring while a queen produce offspring. Together with his collaborator Koryu Kin (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), Guillermo proposed that the evolution of Eusocial behaviours could in fact be reflective of self-domesticaton. Domesticated species possess a series characteristic traits that could be produced by a mild-neurocristopathy (i.e. a defect in neural crest development). They argue that a mild-neurocristopathy can explain many of the NMR’s unusual traits from their behaviour and appearance to its resistance to pain.
And there is more.. As part of an placement in industry (at Exscientia), Guillermo has filed a patent and published a first-author paper in which he developed new computational pipelines that can identify hotspots for potential investments from the pharmaceutical industry. This involves the use of deep learning to detect genes that are trending in the scientific literature. FINALLY, he collaborated with Julia Terreros (Universidad Automoma de Madrid), in the development of computational pipelines for the automated detection of neurons and organelles in challenging immuno-stained samples.
Selected papers:
Chuai & G. Serrano Nájera, et al. (2021). Reconstruction of distinct vertebrate gastrulation modes by modulating key cell behaviours in the chick embryo. 10.1101/2021.10.03.462938.
Serra, G. Serrano Nájera, et al. (2021). A mechanochemical model recapitulates distinct vertebrate gastrulation modes. 10.1101/2021.10.03.462928.