Category Archives: Meetings

2022 BSDB Wolpert Medal Winner: Andreas Prokop

Following last year’s sad passing of one of the greats of Developmental Biology, Lewis Wolpert, the BSDB committee has decided to launch a new annual medal in his honour. Lewis was well known for his ability to distil our subject’s most engaging and fundamental problems into concise and well-grounded core concepts of Biology. This led to vastly important contributions to research in our field, but also to the communication of its problems to a broader audience. Through teaching, popular science writing and acting as a spokesperson for Science as a whole, Lewis inspired many of us into the deeper study of Developmental Biology. Therefore, our annual ‘Wolpert medal’ will be presented to an individual who has made extraordinary contributions to the teaching and communication of Developmental Biology.

 

We are very happy to announce that the second winner of the BSDB Wolpert medal will be Prof. Andreas Prokop from the University of Manchester.

Andreas has done a huge amount of highly valuable work in the teaching and advocation of developmental biology. Andreas has established the Manchester Fly Facility as a major hub for teaching, training, and outreach activities for the fly community. Their training package has been downloaded over 30,000 times and provides a complete training to get people started in using Drosophila as a powerful research model. At least one of these downloads can be attributed to our current BSDB chair, who can testify to its usefulness!

The droso4schools online resource provides an exemplar for the developmental biology community on how to provide easy access to resources that can be directly provided to schools in the communication of science.  In multiple languages, it provides lesson plans that together teach curriculum-relevant fundamentals of developmental biology and genetics in fun and enticing ways whilst introducing GCSE/A-level students to the use of Drosophila. The list of almost 80 schools that the programme has collaborated with and testimony from teachers on six continents is a clear demonstration to its success and longevity.

For those looking to engage the public with fly research beyond engaging with schools is the droso4public resource, providing a huge collection of movies, animations and guidance on how to develop one’s own engagement activity. Andreas has written extensively on this topic and provides in depth and thoughtful advice and strategies on how to engage effectively with the public about our research (Patel and Prokop; 2015, 2017). Another example is the edition of a special issue in Sem Cell Dev Biol entitled “Science communication in the field of fundamental biomedical research” which had over 50,000 downloads in the first 30 months after publication. Andrea’s personal contributions to public engagement are numerous, but one event stands out in particular due to its scale and reach. Housed in the Town Hall of central Manchester, the Brain Box event had over 5400 visitors on one day involving all three Manchester Unis, the city council, NHS, museums, charities and artists. It enabled visitors to explore what we know of the mysteries of the human brain through a series of interconnected experiences, and alongside an exciting talks and performances.

During his time as Communications Officer for the BSDB, Andreas made major contributions to the ways that we as a society communicate and advocate for our science. The advocacy page of our website provides valuable pointers on how to communicate the impact and reach of developmental biology research to a non-expert audience. Importantly, this page holds a complete list of worldwide developmental biology communities and networks that help to broaden our society’s reach. Information and guidance on public engagement activities are also detailed on the outreach page and provide a valuable resource for all of us.

A major achievement for Andreas during his tenure as communications officer was to track down the BSDB archive and make it available online. This reaches back to the foundations of the society over 70 years ago. Read more about the history of the BSDB, and the tomb-cracking moment of when Andreas discovered the archive in the lab of Michael Taylor (Secretary 2008-13) in Cardiff in this blog.

Thank you, Andreas, for all your work in driving advocacy for developmental biology and providing such concrete and helpful resources in its teaching and outreach. It is an honour for the BSDB to be able to award you the second Wolpert medal, in 2022.

 

Selected papers:

Patel, S., Prokop, A. (2015). How to develop objective-driven comprehensive science outreach initiatives aiming at multiple audiences. bioRxiv 10.1101/023838

Patel, S., Prokop, A. (2017). The Manchester Fly Facility: Implementing an objective-driven long-term science communication initiative. Semin Cell Dev Biol, Volume 70, October 2017, Pages 38-48

2022 BSDB Waddington Medal winner: Val Wilson

The Waddington Medal is the only national award in Developmental Biology. It honours outstanding research performance as well as services to the subject community. The medal is awarded annually at the BSDB Spring Meeting, where the recipient presents the Waddington Medal Lecture.

 

We are very pleased to announce that this year’s Waddington medal winner is Professor Valerie Wilson, Personal Chair in Early Embryo Development at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh. Val’s research career has led to several seminal contributions to mammalian development, built on highly specialist skills in the micromanipulation and culture of mouse embryos.

Val began her research career as a PhD student in the lab of Martin Evans, in the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge. She then moves to the lab of Rosa Beddington for her post-doctoral training where she mastered skills in the culture whole mouse embryos ex vivo, enabling her tackle fundamental problems in how the mammalian body axis is established during early development. A key contribution during this time was the use of chimeric embryos consisting of genetically marked mutant ES cells injected into wild type blastocysts. By performing this experiment with cells mutant for the early mesodermal marker, T (or brachyury), it was possible to demonstrate a cell autonomous requirement for this transcription factor in the transition of cells through the primitive streak (Wilson et al., 1995).

She then learned postimplantation mouse embryology, most crucially the micromanipulation and culture of whole embryos ex vivo, under the supervision of Rosa Beddington. During this time, she investigated the role of the transcription factor T(brachyury) in mouse antero-posterior axis elongation, using genetically marked mutant ES cells injected into wild type blastocysts to create chimeras.  These studies were early milestones in the transgenic mouse field as they showed that T cell-autonomously permits cells to pass through the primitive streak during late gastrulation to become mesoderm. Beautifully, Val has returned to this initial discovery using modern single cell sequencing technologies in collaboration with the labs of John Marioni and Göttgens to investigate the alterations in gene expression trajectories that T mutant cells take when developing in chimeric embryos (Guibentif et al.,2021).

Perhaps one of the most striking and important discoveries from Val’s career has arisen from her study of anterior-posterior body axis elongation. A series of remarkable finding involving serial transplantations of cell populations from older to younger embryos had demonstrated the existence of a population of stem cells capable of outliving their normal potential and continually giving rise to both spinal cord and paraxial mesodermal derivatives. First, in the caudal-lateral epiblast adjacent to the node (Cambray and Wilson, 2002), and later in the chordal-neural hinge (Cambray and Wilson, 2007). Recognising that to a full investigation of their biology requires lineage tracing of individual cells, Val embarked on an extensive retrospective clonal analysis study of mouse development together with her then-PhD student, Elena Tzouanacou and the lab of Jean-Francois Niçolas at the Insitut Pasteur, Paris. Through a thorough and systematic analysis of single cell clones from thousands of labelled embryos, it was possible to demonstrate the existence of a bipotent stem cell population called Neuromesodermal Progenitors that defy early germ layer specification and continue to generate both spinal cord and paraxial mesoderm derivatives throughout somitogenesis in the mouse embryo (Tzouanacou et al., 2009).

“Many of Val’s contributions are not recognised by authorship on papers. She is regularly consulted by early career researchers and group leaders from other labs seeking insights into their own data or technical help due to her micromanipulation skills. She always shares her time and expertise generously while asking nothing in return. Therefore, many of her valuable contributions to the community and the field remain largely unseen”.

  • Anahi Binagui-Casas

Val’s contributions to our fundamental understanding of mammalian developmental biology will continue to have a long-term impact in the field. It is because of her skills in embryology and teaching that she has been able to change the way we look at the mouse embryo, and she is therefore routinely consulted by developmental biologists for help and advice. A recent contribution has included working together with Kirstie Lawson to provide a revised mouse embryo staging guide, that has been essential in informing definitions included in the eMouseAtlas.  It is such long-lasting contributions to the field that are deserving of the BSDB Waddington medal, 2022.

Selected papers:

Wilson, V., Manson, L., Skarnes, W. C. & Beddington, R. S. (1995) The T gene is necessary for normal mesodermal morphogenetic cell movements during gastrulation. Development 121, 3, p. 877-86 10 p.

Carolina Guibentif, Jonathan A. Griffiths, Ivan Imaz-Rosshandler, Shila Ghazanfar, Jennifer Nichols, Valerie Wilson, Berthold Göttgens, John C. Marioni (2021). Diverse Routes toward Early Somites in the Mouse Embryo, Developmental Cell, Volume 56, Issue 1.

Cambray, N., and Wilson, V. (2002). Axial progenitors with extensive potency are localised to the mouse chordoneural hinge. Development 129, 4855–4866.

Cambray, N., and Wilson, V. (2007). Two distinct sources for a population of maturing axial progenitors. Development 134, 2829–2840.

BSDB/BSCB 2022 Conference is now open for registration!

We are delighted to announce that registration for the BSDB/BSCB 2022 conference is now open.

Register Here!

     Featuring talks from our recently awarded medal winners!

The 2022 Beddington Medal winner Guillermo Serrano Najera

and

The 2022 Cheryll Tickle Award winner: Emma Rawlins

Full award announcements will be communicated at the meeting, along with the super secret winners of our Waddington and Wolpert awards.

 

Submit your abstracts here

 

 

 

 

Postponement of ISD/BSDB Joint meeting

The 2020 ISD/BSDB Joint meeting, originally planned for September this year, has been postponed due to concerns about Covid-19.  The meeting will be postponed by two years in order to avoid a clash with the autumn 2021 ISDB meeting.

The ISD/BSDB meeting will now take place on  4-8 September 2022. It will still take place in the beautiful setting of Valletta Malta. Registration will open in early 2022.

eBSDB/GenSoc meeting: Online conferencing hosted by The Node

Following the cancellation of BSDB/GenSoc2020, the meeting organisers have been seeking ways to maintain some elements of the meeting through online interactions. We do not plan to run a full virtual meeting, but we do have plans to enable speakers and poster presenters to give brief informal summaries, tweetorials, gifs or visual abstracts of their work, to share their talks or posters using figshare, or even to upload recordings of their talks if they wish to. These options are open to (and optional for) all presenters but we particularly encourage students and postdocs to participate. Hopefully this will also allow those who were not registered for the meeting this year to benefit too!

We also hope to provide an online version of our always-popular Careers session as well as interviews with some of our medal winners and other speakers. Other highlights will include the big reveal of this years Waddington Medal winner and even an e-conference-party via a curated spotify dancefloor playlist that you will all be invited to contribute to.

We will post guidelines for participation in eBSDB/GenSoc on this post over the coming few days. This will be updated periodically as our plans progress so do keep an eye on this blog post or the BSDB twitter feed https://twitter.com/_BSDB_ (the meeting hashtag is #BSDBGenSoc2020).

The BSDB and GenSoc are hugely grateful to the editors at Development and The Node for initiating these plans, providing expertise and infrastructure, and for their generous offer to put in the considerable amount of work to make this happen. Yet another reason to support your community journal!