Category Archives: Meetings

Awards, Meetings, Reports

Report: Joint BSBD/Nordic Autumn Meeting

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BSDB Autumn Meetings can be organised by members. So do not hesitate to approach meetings@bsdb.org if you have any ideas. However, note that we are booked for meetings through to 2021 (see BSDB meetings webpage). So think ahead, let us know, and we will help you with the organisation.
Read here a report about the Autumn Meeting 2017, jointly organised by the BSDB together with the Swedish, Finish, Norwegian and Danish Societies of Developmental Biology, which took place 25-27 October 2017 in the Aula Medica of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

 

Joint BSDB/Nordic Conference on Developmental Biology and Regeneration

The Joint BSDB/Nordic Conference on Developmental Biology ad Regeneration was first proposed to SWEDBO and FSDB in December 2014, so had been in planning for almost three years. It was organised by Megan Davey (BSDB), Joe Rainger (Univ. Edinburgh), Elke Ober and Palle Serup (Denmark), Satu Kuure (FSDB), Luiza Ghila and Helge Raeder (Norway), Christos Samakovlis, Andreas Simon and Sara Wilson (SWEDBO). Particular thanks go to Sara Wilson, Andreas Simon and their ground support, Paulina Pettersson, for their hard work and organisation, and to Joe Rainger who drove the sponsorship. Thanks also to the BSDB members who travelled to Sweden for the meeting and Thomas Jessell who could be persuaded to travel all the way from New York for his plenary session. I strongly feel that the meeting was an outstanding success

Attendance – With volunteers and sponsor attendees we had a total of 212 attendants, of which 194 were registered scientific attendees, 15 were invited speakers, and 22 were BSDB members (8 being supported by travel grants). Other than UK attendees, Sweden (understandably) had the most attendees (94) but there was also a strong showing from Denmark, Finland and China. We additionally had attendees from Austria, Ireland, Brazil, Norway, Spain, Czech Republic and USA.

Program – We aimed to have a general scientific program covering all aspects of Developmental Biology in plants, invertebrates and vertebrates. With Tom Jessell (Columbia University, NY. USA) as our EMBO-sponsored plenary, there was a strong emphasis on nervous system development (Session 1 -13 talks), which included development of motor circuits, visual circuits, enteric nervous system, regeneration, neural crest, evolution and single cell transcriptomics. Highlights of this session were Tom’s superb talk who explained how they pick apart the identity and function of interneurons, and the presentation by Igor Adameyko (Karolinska Institute, Sweden) about single cell transcriptomics in neural crest development. Session 2 (15 talks) was on organogenesis & morphogenesis and covered mathematical modelling of development, mammalian blastocyst, pancreas, heart and kidney development, and vertebrate genetics. A particular highlight was Leif Andersson’s (Uppsala University, Sweden) talk who illustrated wonderfully how structural genomic changes contribute to dramatic phenotypic evolution in birds, with particular emphasis on behaviour and plumages. Session 3 (8 talks) was on stem cells & regeneration which included a huge variety of science, including the role of forces in developing stem cell niches, regeneration in salamanders, skeletal muscle, tissue repair and regeneration and organisation in plants. A highlight was Ari Pekka Mahonen’s presentation who presented his work identifying a core regulatory network within the cambial stem cell niche in Arabidopsis.

 

We also had two 3hr-long poster sessions with drinks and nibbles. The buzz was really fantastic, attendance was superb and, in fact, we had to ask people to leave at the end of both evenings, so security could close the building.

Prizes – The Swedish society for developmental biology (SWEDBO) gave out three €100 travel grants as poster prizes to Yiqiao Wang (Karolinska Institute, Sweden), Mariane Teradup Pedersen (Univ. Copenhagen, Denmark) and Li Hi (Stockholm University, Sweden). A prize of €200 donated by Scanbur, was awarded to Arvydas Dapnkunas (University of Helsinki, Finland) for his work developing a 3D culture system to explore factors governing the organisation and self-renewal of nephron progenitors. Finally, the BSDB organised the Dennis Summerbell Award Lecture which was given by Helen Weavers on the inflammatory response to tissue damage in Drosophila (see details here).

 

L-R: Poster prize winners Yiqiao Wang, Li Hi, and Arvydas Dapkunas, with organiser Joe Rainger

Venue – What can I say … the Aula Medica at the Karolinska Institute was amazing! Beautiful, beautiful building! Amazing staff! Best AV I’ve experienced ever! Great areas for posters and sponsors! Super comfy chairs! A green room! With showers (just in case…??)! And the best of it all: we could get it at a good price since it was organised internally through the Karolinska Institute.

 

Sponsorship – Joe Rainger led on the recruitment of sponsors, including designing the different sponsorship rates, contacting sponsors and assisting them on-site, and establishing communication between sponsors, Aula Medica team and conference attendees. The effort the sponsors themselves put in was great. For example, Nikon and Zeiss bought microscopes including a spinning disk confocal from Nikon. Everyone came away really happy, and Aula Medica was very impressed, as were the sponsors.

Megan Davey

Awards, Meetings, News

Helen Weavers – Dennis Summerbell Awardee 2017

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Following a generous donation, the BSDB has instituted the Dennis Summerbell Lecture, to be delivered at its annual Autumn Meeting by a junior researcher at either PhD or Post-doctoral level. The 2017 lecture awardee was Helen Weavers (School of Biochemistry, Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, University of Bristol) with her submitted abstract “Understanding the inflammatory response to tissue damage in Drosophila: a complex interplay of pro-inflammatory attractant signals, developmental priming and tissue cyto-protection”. Her award lecture was presented at the Autumn Meeting 2017, jointly organised by the BSDB together with the Swedish, Finish, Norwegian and Danish Societies of Developmental Biology, 25-27 October 2017 in Stockholm.

Helen’s work so far

After completing her PhD studies investigating Drosophila nephrogenesis in Helen Skaer’s lab in Cambridge, Helen moved to Bristol in 2013 to take up a 5 year, MRC-funded post-doc position between Paul Martin’s and Will Wood’s labs. Her first publication from this work (Weavers et al., 2016, Cell 165, 1658ff.), showed that Drosophila macrophages (haemocytes), must first be “primed” by engulfing at least one dead cell, before they are responsive to wound attractants. These findings are important because the majority of human pathologies are a consequence of too little or too much inflammation. What really excited the judges of the Denis Summberbell Lecture award was the work which had led to her most recent paper entitled “Systems Analysis of the Dynamic Inflammatory Response to Tissue Damage Reveals Spatiotemporal Properties of the Wound Attractant Gradient” (Weavers et al., 2016, Curr Biol 26, 1974ff.). This was a true multidisciplinary study, using a combined approach of mathematics and biology to analyse macrophage behaviours in response to tissue damage. Although the identity of the wound attractant signal/s are still not clear, this study was able to determine several of the characteristics of the attractant(s). Building on this strong platform of work, Helen is currently developing her own research towards understanding tissue protection/resilience in Drosophila and man, and this was an exciting novel element of her award lecture. In her talk, she described in a stunningly visual and understandable way how successful tissue repair relies not only on the host’s ability to mount an effective inflammatory response, but also on its ability to limit it. Her talk was a fabulous highlight and a shining example of high quality research by members of the BSDB.

Lecture abstract:

Understanding the inflammatory response to tissue damage in Drosophila: a complex interplay of pro-inflammatory attractant signals, developmental priming and tissue cyto-protection

Helen Weavers, Bristol, UK

An effective inflammatory response is pivotal to fight infection, clear debris and orchestrate the repair of injured tissues; however, inflammation must be tightly regulated since many human disease pathologies are a consequence of inflammation gone awry. Using a genetically tractable Drosophila model, I use precise genetic manipulation, live imaging and computational modelling to dissect the mechanisms that activate the inflammatory response to tissue damage and those that simultaneously protect the regenerating tissue from immunopathology. Upon tissue damage, immune cells (particularly neutrophils and macrophages) are recruited into the damaged area by damage signals (danger-associated molecular patterns, DAMPs) released from the injured tissue. In collaboration with computational biologists, we employ a sophisticated Bayesian statistical approach to uncover novel details of the pro-inflammatory wound attractants, by analysing the spatio-temporal behaviour of Drosophila immune cells as they respond to wounds. We show that the wound attractant is released by wound edge cells and spreads slowly through the tissue, at rates far slower than small molecule DAMPs such as ATP and H2O2. Strikingly, we also find that immune cells must be developmentally ‘primed’ by uptake of apoptotic corpses before they can respond to these damage attractant signals. Such corpse-induced priming is an example of “innate immune memory” and may serve to amplify the inflammatory response in situations involving excessive cell death – and otherwise limit an overzealous and damaging immune response. Indeed, whilst inflammation is clearly beneficial, toxic molecules (e.g. reactive oxygen species, ROS) generated by immune cells to fight infection, can also cause significant bystander damage to host tissue and delay repair – and may underpin chronic wound-healing pathologies in the clinic. To counter this, I find that wounded Drosophila tissue employs a complex network of cyto-protective pathways that promote tissue ‘resilience’, which both protect against ROS-induced damage and stimulate damage repair. Successful tissue repair, therefore, not only relies on the host’s ability to mount an effective inflammatory response, but also its ability to finely tune it and limit associated immunopathology.

Awards, Meetings, News

Iwo Kucinski – Dennis Summerbell Lecture awardee 2016

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iwokucinskiFollowing a generous donation, the BSDB has instituted the Dennis Summerbell Lecture, to be delivered at its annual Autumn Meeting by a junior researcher at either PhD or Post-doctoral level. The inaugural Dennis Summerbell Lecture was given by Iwo Kucinski at the 2016 BSDB Autumn Meeting. His work was carried out in Eugenia Piddin’s laboratory at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge. The lecture was entitled “The molecular signature of the loser cell status reveals key pathways regulating cell competition”.

 

Abstract:

Cell competition is a process conceptually similar to natural selection at the cellular level. In this process a population of less fit cells (losers) is sacrificed and eliminated by a population of fitter cells (winners), with the ultimate goal of maximising tissue and organism fitness. This mechanism has been proposed to play a role in tissue health and turnover and in disease states such as cancer. Despite its discovery four decades ago and increasing examples of mutations inducing the loser status, the molecular properties that earmark cells as losers have not been identified.We identified molecular differences between winner and loser cells through comparative transcriptomics of two seemingly functionally unrelated mutations, which share the loser phenotype: Minute heterozygous mutations (ribosomal defect) and a mutation in mahj (involved in cell polarity and protein degradation). This revealed a molecular signature composed of a core set of genes that are differentially expressed specifically in loser cells.Through subsequent functional analysis we found that three components of this signature play an important role in controlling proliferation and cell death during cell competition. First, loser cells chronically activate JNK signaling, which restricts their intrinsic growth rate. Secondly, the constitutive activation of JAK/STAT pathway promotes proliferation of loser cells but also nonautonomously fuels the expansion of competing wild-type cells, boosting cell competition. Thirdly, we find that chronic activation of Nrf2 induces the oxidative stress response and that this serves a dual purpose: it promotes survival of loser cells on their own, but it is also sufficient to trigger their elimination when they are confronted by wild-type cells. Altogether these findings provide important new mechanistic insight on how cell competition occurs.

Awards, Meetings, News

Medal & Award winners at the 2017 Spring Meeting

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As every year, the Spring meeting was the time of awards and medals! This year, we had awardees of three societies who are listed below. For those wanting to have a look at the topics of talks and posters presented at the meeting, please download the abstract book here.

► Medal Awards

► PhD Poster Prizes (are prizes still the same?)

  • 1st BSDB PhD Poster Prize winner (Attendance at SDB 76th Annual Meeting, Minneapolis): Claire Bromley (Kings College London) – Poster 25 “Investigating biomechanical forces in zebrafish brain morphogenesis“
  • 1st BSCB PhD Poster Prize winner (visit to 2017 ASCB/EMBO meeting, Philadelphia): Christina Dix (University College London) – poster 5 “Adhesion, not cortical tension, is vital for successful cytokinesis in RPE-1 cells“
  • 1st Genetics Society (£100 cash prize sponsored by BioMed Central): Alexandra Buffry (Oxford Brookes University) – Poster 182 “Investigating gene regulatory network architecture and evolution in different developmental contexts“
  • 2nd BSDB PhD Poster Prize (£100 cash prize sponsored by BioMed Central): Ariadna Gador Navarro-Aragall (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology) – Poster 86 “SEMA3E and SEMA3C Cooperate to establish vascular boundaries“
  • 2nd BSCB PhD Poster Prize (£100 cash prize sponsored by BioMed Central): Sophie Adams (Barts Cancer Institute) – Poster 32 “‘Exosome signatures’ as biomarkers for centrosome-targeted therapy in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC)“

► Postdoc Poster Prizes

  • 1st BSDB Prize (£200 cash prize sponsored by BioMed Central): Carla Mulas (University of Cambridge) – Poster 129 “Functional characterisation of metachronous cell state transitions“
  • 1st BSCB Prize (£100 Cash prize sponsored by BioMed Central): Girish Mali (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology) – Poster 47 “Assembly Mechanisms of Dynein Motors“
  • 1st Genetics Society (£100 bank transfer sponsored by BioMed Central): Laura Molina-Garicia (University College London) – Poster 122 “Sexy learning in C. elegans”
  • 2nd BSDB Prize (£100 cash prize sponsored by BioMed Central): Hadi Boukhatmi (University of Cambridge) – Poster 92 “Molecular logic behind Satellite cells specification in Drosophila”

► Others

  • Genetics Society Overall Poster Prize (Junior Scientist Conference Grant, Scheme A): Alewo Idoko-Akoh (The Roslin Institute) – Poster 185 “CXCR4 and c-Kit signalling are required for directed migration of chicken primordial germ cells through the chick embryonic vascular system“
  • BSDB Honorary Mention (Certificate): Eva Higginbotham (University of Cambridge) -Poster 114 “Neurotransmitter specification in the ventral nerve cord of Drosophila melanogaster”
  • The BSCB Science writing Prize: Marcia Kishida (University of Cambridge)
  • The BSCB Image Award:
    • 1st: Cristiano Lucci, School of Life Sciences, University of Nottingham
    • 2nd: Anneliese Norris, School of Biology (University of St Andrews)
    • 3rd: Mohammad Mofatteh (MRC LMB, Cambridge), Alan Prescott, College of life Sciences, University of Dundee

Movies of medal lectures

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv4qZttn9is; w=520; h=405

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9ndsOuRCE; w=520; h=405

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3zMt6uYpY; w=520; h=405

Hooke Medal Lecture: Ewa Paluch

Women in Cell Biology Lecture: Victoria Sanz Moreno

Events, Meetings

Meeting Report: BSDB Autumn Meeting 2016

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Under the sponsorship of the Anne McLaren Memorial Trust Fund and The Company of Biologists, the BSDB Autumn meeting organised by Jenny Nichols and Tristan Rodriguez took place in the Pollock Halls at the University of Edinburgh. The topic this year was: ‘Chimaeras and their use in studying developmental processes and disease models’. Chimaeras are made of cells from two or more different organisms of the same or different species. Since their first conception, chimaeras have been an essential tool to dissect cellular potential and are used to address a large number of questions in developmental biology using a variety of different model organisms, from plants to vertebrates. Read the full meeting report.