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BSDB Meeting Report: 70th Anniversary Spring Meeting

June 15, 2018 comms Leave a comment

This year, is the BSDB’s 70th anniversary, and this was clearly reflected at our Spring Meeting, 15-18 April 2018 in Warwick! Apart from an outstanding speaker list, and the award of most BSDB medals & prizes of 2018, we saw a very special event with many extras, as is well described here by Dillan Saunders. Dillan undertook his BSc Honours with Michael Akam studying centipedes, is currently performing his MSc in the lab of Megan Davey date-mapping the developing limb bud of chick with novel transgenic technologies. and will be returning to Cambridge later this year to begin The Wellcome Trust Developmental Biology PhD program. Dillan’s blog post aligns with a long-standing tradition of the BSDB to engage young members (see our archive blog), and we strongly encourage PhD students and postdocs to make their voice heard by writing reports or articles for our website and newsletter.

The British Society for Developmental Biology (BSDB) recently held its annual Spring Meeting at the University of Warwick. This was no ordinary meeting, though it is fair to say that BSDB meetings rarely are. This Spring Meeting celebrated the 70^th anniversary of the BSDB and did so excellently, birthday cakes and all. With a retrospective look at the past of the society, and fantastic speakers showcasing present and ongoing work, the stage was set for a meeting that not only celebrated a strong history, but also looked forward, critically yet hopefully, to the future of Developmental Biology and of the BSDB itself.

The conference began with a career workshop for students and post-docs (see our blog post). In keeping with the celebration of the BSDB’s birthday, the focus of the workshop was on staying in academia. A variety of speakers and other group leaders fielded questions and shared details of the personal journeys to have brought them to their current positions. I had the opportunity to speak to Henrik Semb – whose example shows that not everyone follows a straight, let alone predictable, career trajectory. Judith Kimble shared her views on not seeing the lab as a place of work, and finally I got to hear Ottoline Leyser’s thoughts on work-life balance; a phrase which misleadingly implies that the two are opposed to one another. It would however be in our best interests, she explained, to see work and life as overlapping and complementary to one another.

After the careers workshop came the first plenary talk, in which Eric Wieschaus explained his recent work on mesoderm invagination in Drosophila and how one transcriptional activation can lead to a sequence of events (Weng and Wieschaus, 2017). Thematically paired with this talk was Maria Leptin’s plenary lecture, in which she discussed the development of in silico models for actin dynamics in order to recapitulate mesoderm invagination (Belmonte et al., 2017).

Emilia receives the Beddington medal from Simon Bullock

Following a short break, the Beddington Medal was awarded to Emily Favuzzi for the best PhD thesis in Developmental Biology of the year, which she performed on the transcriptional networks at play during interneuron development (see our blog post). She then gave a talk that illustrated how meticulous and comprehensive her work was (Favuzzi et al., 2017). This was followed up by a plenary talk from Marianne Bronner on the transcriptional networks of specific populations of neural crest cells, with attention to how her work with lampreys shows that the neural crest has acquired additional functions in the jawed vertebrates (Green et al., 2017). Unfazed by technical difficulties with the final slides of the presentation, Bronner took on the role of the lamprey and humorously indicated on herself the location of the neural crest cells.

The evening was capped off by three events that celebrated the history, and looked into the future, of the BSDB and Developmental Biology as a whole. First, came two talks from historians of science, Nick Hopwood and Tim Horder. Hopwood’s talk detailed the story of the crystallization of modern Developmental Biology in the late ‘40s and ‘50s. He described how the London Embryologists Club began in 1948 and how it then broadened both its geographical location and the field that it represented to form the BSDB (see also our archive blog).

Off the back of the historians’ view of the past, came a panel discussion of the future of the field. The panel was made up of Ottoline Leyser, James Briscoe, Maria Leptin, Jonathan Slack, Judith Kimble and Patrick Lemaire. They fielded several thought-provoking questions from the audience, which led to a lively discussion. As might be expected from a big anniversary meeting, there was much reminiscing on the early days of molecular Developmental Biology in the 1980s, often referred to as the ‘Golden Age.’ When asked what made this era such an exciting time for Developmental Biology, Jonathan Slack noted that it was a time when developmental biologists were becoming dissatisfied with the explanations of the previous heyday of embryology in the 1930s.

In the subsequent discussion, Ottoline Leyser pointed out that, what with the advent of new technologies and ideas, we are in fact in the midst of a golden age for Developmental Biology. Indeed, though there are still some who believe that certain areas of Developmental Biology hold no more secrets, recent years have shown new developments in, for example, the study of the anterior-posterior axis in Drosophila (Clark and Akam, 2016) and the C. elegans cell lineage (Sammut et al., 2015).

Other points of discussion included the importance of studying development within the context of time and the great potential of computational modelling. Discussed also were the logistics of maintaining an idea of the overall picture without becoming too focused on a single model system. The final event of the day was an informal round table discussion where the points raised previously, and many others, were discussed at length over much wine.

Monday began with a plenary talk from Matthew Freeman, amusingly titled ‘Confessions of an ex-developmental biologist’, in which he described his current focus on cell signalling and the pertinence of Cell Biology to the understanding of development (e.g. Christova et al., 2013). Following this, the two morning sessions covered ‘TISSUE AND ORGAN DEVELOPMENT’ and ‘DEVELOPMENTAL GENE REGULATORY NETWORKS.’ I listened to James Briscoe’s talk on the Sonic Hedgehog morphogen gradient in the neural tube and the interesting mathematical models that his lab has used to explore the time and precision of its patterning. Virginia Papaioannou then spoke about the role of Tbx6 in left-right axis establishment (Concepcion et al., 2017).

Also in this session were complementing talks from Eileen Furlong (Mikhaylichenko et al., 2018) and Mike Levine (Lim et al., 2018) on the relationships between enhancers and promoters and how chromatin architecture regulates gene expression. After a lunch poster session, the afternoon sessions began with talks on ‘MECHANISMS OF GLOBAL GENE REGULATION’ and ‘CELL BIOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT’. That afternoon, I caught a talk by Robb Krumlauf, in which he showed some fascinating lamprey experiments which supplied further detail on the ancient interactions between retinoic acid and Hox genes. Following this, Caroline Telfer demonstrated her impressive quantity of PhD work on the upstream regulation of the GATA genes, and then Pavel Tomancak showed a combination of beautiful live imaging and computational models for serosa closure in Tribolium castaneum embryos. The day’s closing plenary lecture was given by Janet Rossant, which included her work on dramatically increasing CRISPR efficiency in early mouse blastocysts.

The highlight of this first evening was the announcement of the Waddington Medal and the Waddington Lecture. The most prestigious prize awarded by the BSDB, the Waddington Medal recognises an individual who has made major contributions to developmental biology in the UK. The recipient of the award is, by tradition, kept a secret until the president of the society awards the medal. Ottoline Leyser introduced the awardee of the medal, after a short bit of suspense and the interesting insight that the last three winners of the prize have been accomplished artists. The medal was awarded to Richard Gardner for his pioneering work on various aspects of early mouse development from clonal lineage analysis and transplantation to axis determination (see our blog post).

In his subsequent lecture, Richard Gardner detailed some of the highlights of his impressive career, punctuated by humorous anecdotes and intriguing details. For instance, he commented on the four passions of Sydney Smith (who taught Gardner at university): Darwin, embryology, Ming dynasty porcelain, and wine (most developmental biologists can relate to at least three). Gardner also acknowledged his students, his mentor Robert Edwards, and collaborators such as Mary Lyon and Martin Johnson.

After the Waddington lecture, was the student and post-doc social in which we were split into teams to create a development-themed piece of art. An hour of glitter, glue, and coloured card later, the products of our endeavours included a model of Waddington’s epigenetic landscape, an interactive and moving model of chick somite formation, and the winning entry, a performance piece showing the injection of labelled cells into a blastocyst.

On Tuesday morning, the opening plenary lecture was given by Sean Carroll. In a similar vein to Matthew Freeman, he described how pursuing his boyhood passion for snakes led him away from developmental biology and to interesting work on the evolution of proteins in snake venom. I then attended the ‘EVO-DEVO’ session in the morning, which ran parallel to ‘STEM CELLS AND REGENERATION’. In this session, I listened to many fascinating talks, which included Patrick Lemaire, on his computer models of ascidian cell fate determination, Karen Sears on the development of several unique aspects of bat morphology, and Miltos Tsiantis on the evolution of leaf form and the identification of a key regulator of leaf shape (Vuolo et al., 2016). Finishing off the session, Peter Holland covered his group’s work on the ParaHox gene, Pdx, in a variety of different bilaterian species.

A second lunch poster session followed, and then the afternoon programming kicked into gear. These were talks grouped under the themes of ‘POSITIONAL INFORMATION’ and ‘CELL FATE’. In the former, Lee Niswander gave a talk on neural tube closure defects (Li et al., 2018), and in the latter, Olivier Pourquie spoke about the importance of using cell culture and iPSCs, which his lab used to generate human pre-somitic mesoderm-like cells. In a talk that very much followed the themes of the conference, James Sharpe acknowledged the 50^th anniversary of Lewis Wolpert’s proposal of the French Flag Problem and re-interpreted the potential solutions to the problem through his data indicating that digits are patterned by a Turing mechanism (Green and Sharpe, 2015).

The final order of business for the day was the BSDB’s annual general meeting. This was an interesting insight into the inner workings of the society, which involved the election of new members to the committee and the presentation of committee officers’ reports.

After the wrap up of the AGM was the conference dinner and party. This was a celebration worthy of marking 70 years of the BSDB – complete with balloons, good food, and plenty of wine. The dinner was topped off with cake, cut by four former presidents of the BSDB.

Also announced were the winners of the post-doc and PhD poster prizes (see our blog post), as well as the winners of the advocacy writing competition, which was initiated specifically for the 70^th anniversary of the BSDB and saw submissions from students and post-docs on the history and future of the BSDB (see our blog post). Fuelled by the great atmosphere, and likely a bit of wine, the dancing began. It was a great experience to see everyone, at all career stages, let loose and enjoy themselves. Particularly popular were the Developmental Biology-themed raps, written and performed by Jerry aka Gerald H Thomsen PhD, and produced and mixed by Philip Larsen. Overall, it was an excellent and celebratory evening.

Gerald Thomsen, Josh Brickman and Philip Larsen

Rap 1: BSDB History (part I & II)

Rap 2: Morphogen Mix

The final morning of the meeting began with a plenary lecture from Ottoline Leyser. She spoke about her work with the plant hormone strigolactone, and its role in regulating the plasticity of branching, and the self-organising auxin network in plants (Ligerot et al., 2017).The enthralling lecture was enough to make anyone want to become a plant biologist. This was followed by two further plenary lectures from Connie Eaves, on the early haematopoietic cell lineage in humans (Sawai et al., 2016), and Edith Heard, on the role of X-chromosome chromatin architecture and its relationship to Xist and X-inactivation (Galupa and Heard, 2018). Then the Cheryll Tickle Medal was awarded to Christiana Ruhrberg (see our blog post) by Cheryll Tickle herself. The Cheryll Tickle Medal is given to a mid-career, female scientist for her outstanding achievements in developmental biology. Christiana Ruhrberg then gave a great lecture on her scientific career so far.

Of particular interest to me was how Ruhrberg neatly combined her early career work in neurogenesis and vasculogenesis to form the focus and direction of her group as a PI, working on the interplay between these two processes. Nicely linking in with the historical theme of the meeting, Ruhrberg noted that she was the first to have ever seen the current BSDB logo (which shows the progression of embryonic development), as the creator of the logo, Jeff Christiansen, was staying at her house when he designed it (see our blog post). The final lecture of the meeting was given by John Gurdon, on the stability and reversal of gene expression in development.

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

This was my first BSDB meeting and it was overall an excellent experience. It showcased cutting-edge science and a great community, the strength of which was demonstrated by the creation of a scientific genealogy, which used pins and thread to plot mentor and mentee relationships as part of a huge interconnected network of developmental biologists.

Weaving pedigree networks: Eric Wieschaus, David Ish-Horowicz, Claudio Stern, Austin Smith

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the BSDB for the conference grant that enabled me to attend. The meeting gave me a new appreciation for the history of Developmental Biology and strengthened my excitement to be a part of its future. Here’s to the next 70 years of the BSDB!

References

Note: where possible published work relevant to the text has been cited.

Belmonte, J. M., M. Leptin and F. Nedelec (2017). “A theory that predicts behaviors of disordered cytoskeletal networks.” Mol Syst Biol 13(9): 941.
Christova, Y., C. Adrain, P. Bambrough, A. Ibrahim and M. Freeman (2013). “Mammalian iRhoms have distinct physiological functions including an essential role in TACE regulation.” EMBO Rep 14(10): 884-890.
Clark, E. and M. Akam (2016). “Odd-paired controls frequency doubling in Drosophila segmentation by altering the pair-rule gene regulatory network.” Elife 5.
Concepcion, D., A. J. Washkowitz, A. DeSantis, P. Ogea, J. I. Yang, N. C. Douglas and V. E. Papaioannou (2017). “Cell lineage of timed cohorts of Tbx6-expressing cells in wild-type and Tbx6 mutant embryos.” Biol Open 6(7): 1065-1073.
Favuzzi, E., A. Marques-Smith, R. Deogracias, C. M. Winterflood, A. Sanchez-Aguilera, L. Mantoan, P. Maeso, C. Fernandes, H. Ewers and B. Rico (2017). “Activity-Dependent Gating of Parvalbumin Interneuron Function by the Perineuronal Net Protein Brevican.” Neuron 95(3): 639-655 e610.
Galupa, R. and E. Heard (2018). “Topologically Associating Domains in Chromosome Architecture and Gene Regulatory Landscapes during Development, Disease, and Evolution.” Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol.
Green, J. B. and J. Sharpe (2015). “Positional information and reaction-diffusion: two big ideas in developmental biology combine.” Development 142(7): 1203-1211.
Green, S. A., B. R. Uy and M. E. Bronner (2017). “Ancient evolutionary origin of vertebrate enteric neurons from trunk-derived neural crest.” Nature 544(7648): 88-91.
Li, H., J. Zhang, S. Chen, F. Wang, T. Zhang and L. Niswander (2018). “Genetic contribution of retinoid-related genes to neural tube defects.” Hum Mutat 39(4): 550-562.
Ligerot, Y., A. de Saint Germain, T. Waldie, C. Troadec, S. Citerne, N. Kadakia, J. P. Pillot, M. Prigge, G. Aubert, A. Bendahmane, O. Leyser, M. Estelle, F. Debelle and C. Rameau (2017). “The pea branching RMS2 gene encodes the PsAFB4/5 auxin receptor and is involved in an auxin-strigolactone regulation loop.” PLoS Genet 13(12): e1007089.
Lim, B., T. Heist, M. Levine and T. Fukaya (2018). “Visualization of Transvection in Living Drosophila Embryos.” Mol Cell 70(2): 287-296 e286.
Sammut, M., S. J. Cook, K. C. Q. Nguyen, T. Felton, D. H. Hall, S. W. Emmons, R. J. Poole and A. Barrios (2015). “Glia-derived neurons are required for sex-specific learning in C. elegans.” Nature 526(7573): 385-390.
Sawai, C. M., S. Babovic, S. Upadhaya, D. Knapp, Y. Lavin, C. M. Lau, A. Goloborodko, J. Feng, J. Fujisaki, L. Ding, L. A. Mirny, M. Merad, C. J. Eaves and B. Reizis (2016). “Hematopoietic Stem Cells Are the Major Source of Multilineage Hematopoiesis in Adult Animals.” Immunity 45(3): 597-609.
Vuolo, F., R. A. Mentink, M. Hajheidari, C. D. Bailey, D. A. Filatov and M. Tsiantis (2016). “Coupled enhancer and coding sequence evolution of a homeobox gene shaped leaf diversity.” Genes Dev 30(21): 2370-2375.
Weng, M. and E. Wieschaus (2017). “Polarity protein Par3/Bazooka follows myosin-dependent junction repositioning.” Dev Biol 422(2): 125-134.

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Student and PostDoc events at the BSDB Spring meeting 2018

May 18, 2018 comms Leave a comment

At the 2018 Spring Meeting in Warwick, the PhD and PostDoc representatives organises a series of events for young researchers. These ranged from asking questions such as “What is the secret to success?” through to some crafty synthetic biology and ending with the award of the 2018 BSDB writing competition.

Career workshop

The career workshop kicked off the BSDB 70th birthday celebrations, with a topic focused on ‘building resilience and overcoming obstacles’. The idea was to utilise the knowledge and experience of the successful developmental biologists attending the meeting to give plenary and session talks. In total we had 18 tables, lead by Ottoline Leyser, Jordan Raff, Robb Krumlauf, Maria Leptin, Steve Wilson, Matthew Freeman, Fiona Watt, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Jan Traas, Judith Kimble, Henrik Semb, Anne Ferguson-Smith, Patrick Lamaire, Jean Paul Vincent, Kate Storey, Austin Smith and Yohanns Belliache.

We wanted to have honest and open discussions about how to succeed in academia. ‘What is the secret to success, if there is any?!’. It is not very often you get to have opportunity to pick the brains of the leaders in your area of interests. This led to an afternoon of lively discussions.

Student/postdoc social

The format of the last couple of student/postdoc socials have been designed to get people to interact with people other than their lab mates! This year was no exception. This year’s activity was for randomly assigned teams to build models, within 1 hour, of any one of the following themes: fertilisation, plant development, somitogenesis, cell-fate determination and evo-devo.

We will let the pictures do the talking, but we were blown away by how amazing the models were and how much effort people put into making them. Megan Davey and Rita Sousa-Nunes judged the competition but had a hard time choosing winners since the models were excellent.

We are grateful to all the exhibitors who kindly donated prizes: Abcam, Class Learning, Proteintech, Philosophical Transactions B and Biographical Memoirs, The Company of Biologists, Stratech, 2BScientific and Indigo Scientific.

2018 BSDB Writing Competition

Finally, the student/postdoc events ended with the announcement of the 2018 Writing Competition. As part of the BSDB 70th anniversary celebrations, we initiated a writing competition where first prize was

a trip to the 77th Annual Society of Developmental Biology meeting (Portland, Oregon, USA). Katherine Brown, Aidan Maartens, Ottoline Leyser and Jonathan Slack judged the competition, selecting Daniyal Jafree as the winner.

So this year, is the final year for us organising these events. It has been a blast. Thank you all for making it such a wonderful and memorable experience. Please don’t forget to contact your future student (students@bsdb.org) or postdoc (postdocs@bsdb.org) reps for any comments or suggestions regarding the British developmental biology community.

See here for more pictures of the student/postdoc events.

Michelle and Alex

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Get to know the new BSDB committee members

May 10, 2018 comms Leave a comment

At the last AGM, held at the 2018 Spring Meeting in Warwick, five new BSDB committee members were elected to take term in autumn. They will replace the five leaving members: our Graduate Representative Alexandra Ashcroft, Postdoc Representative Michelle Ware, Secretary Kim Dale, Meetings Officer Josh Brickman, and Communications Officer Andreas Prokop (see a complete list of committee members here). Please, read here about the new committee members, their careers, research interests and plans for their time on the committee.

Jessica Forsyth – the new Graduate Representative

I’m extremely happy to be acting as the new Graduate Representative for BSDB, following Alexandra Ashcroft who has worked to represent graduate students at meetings and enhance the student experience. I hope to further this work, and make sure the BSDB meetings continue to meet the needs of students at various stages within their academic careers (see Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17, p.30ff.).

As a Physics with Medical Physics graduate, I’m relatively new to the field of Developmental Biology. I made this switch when I applied for the Quantitative and Biophysical Biology programme at The University of Manchester. Now in my first year of my PhD, I’m completing two rotation projects within the department. In my first rotation project, I worked on the pre-implantation mouse embryo with Berenika Plusa, and started to develop a mathematical tool to match single cells across imaging modalities, together with Simon Cotter from the Mathematics department. Now I am currently working with Martin Baron, and attempting to develop a mathematical model which encompasses the role of Notch in Drosophila wing vein formation, and to inform this model with live imaging studies.

Changing fields for my PhD seemed daunting when applying, but having been a part of two labs, I realise that there is a huge role for Mathematics and Physics to play in Developmental Biology. This was confirmed in my recent attendance to the BSDB Spring Meeting, where numerous talks described their collaborations with more theoretical labs. I hope to encourage the attendance of more theoretically based labs to BSDB meetings to encourage collaborations across disciplines.

If you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to contact me by email. I look forward to hearing from you and meeting you at the next BSDB meetings.

Charlotte Sophie Louise Bailey – the Postdoc Representative

Having completed my PhD in the field of vertebrate somitogenesis in the lab of Kim Dale at the University of Dundee, I am now a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Elke Ober at the Novo Nordisk Center for Stem Cell Biology (DanStem) in Copenhagen. I am interested in determining the cell behavioural dynamics underpinning liver regeneration in zebrafish.

I am honoured to have been elected to serve on the BSDB committee as postdoc representative. In this role, I aim to draw on my experiences in event management and public outreach to build on the fantastic work of my predecessor Michelle Ware to support postdoctoral scientists within the BSDB community (see the PhD/postdoc website and Facebook group).

For the budding young developmental biologist, the highlight of the scientific year has to be the BSDB Spring meeting – which I encourage every postdoc to attend! With an unfailingly engaging scientific and societal programme (Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17, p.30ff.), this annual meeting consistently stands apart as the forum to network within the Developmental Biology community and beyond, as well as offering exposure to a broad range of exciting, cutting edge science and ideas. As part of my role as BSDB postdoc representative, I aim to tackle the increasing demand by postdocs for interdisciplinary training and discussion by introducing workshops at the annual Spring Meeting with a focus on introducing and developing cross-disciplinary skill sets and network connections, such as Python/Matlab programming, big data mining and biophysics. These workshops could also be used as a bridge for discussion of career choices both inside and outside of academia and the development of transferable skills.

Undoubtedly, one of the strongest attributes of the BSDB is its great sense of community and inclusion. Following Brexit, sustaining a strong feeling of unity within the scientific community will be more important than ever to preserve the UK’s reputation as a welcoming and international environment for research excellence (see also ‘Chair’s welcome note’ in Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17, p.4f.). In conjunction with the The Company of Biologists, the BSDB offers amazing support to its early-career members both financially through travel grants to attend scientific meetings in the UK and abroad, and personally at the many meetings and workshops organised annually and through multimedia such as ‘the Node’, Facebook and Twitter (Vicente et al., 2017). I implore all postdocs to take advantage of these fantastic opportunities to engage with the BSDB and other subject-specific international societies to help us preserve and nurture our supportive global scientific community.

Take part and develop your potential as a developmental biologist! Become a member of the BSDB to receive all of these great benefits. Don’t forget to follow ‘The Node’ on their website, Twitter or Facebook and check the BSDB website regularly for many interesting posts and discussions.

Got an idea for a great workshop or event? Don’t hold back – get in touch with me by email.

Tanya T. Whitfield

Tanya is Professor of Developmental Biology at the University of Sheffield, where she is a member of the Bateson Centre and Department of Biomedical Science [LINK].

Tanya studied early Xenopus development for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Chris Wylie. In 1994, she was an EMBO short-term fellow in the lab of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard in Tübingen, Germany, where she contributed to analysis of mutations affecting ear development isolated in a large-scale zebrafish mutagenesis screen for embryonic phenotypes. She continued to work on these mutants as a postdoc in the lab of Julian Lewis, first at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Developmental Biology Unit in Oxford, and later in London.

Tanya established her lab in Sheffield in 1997 to continue work on the developing vertebrate inner ear, using the zebrafish as a model system. The ear is a fascinating system for study, due to its complex three-dimensional arrangement of interlinked ducts and chambers, and multitude of different cell types, including neurons, sensory hair cells, supporting and secretory cells. An enduring interest in the lab has been the analysis of signalling events that pattern the anteroposterior axis of the otic placode, precursor of the inner ear. More recently, a major focus has been on the dynamic epithelial rearrangements that generate the three semicircular canal ducts in the ear, and the use of light-sheet microscopy to image these events in real time in the live embryo. Additional recent highlights from the lab include the identification of glycoproteins required for otolith tethering in the ear, and use of the zebrafish as a screening tool for drug discovery.

Tanya is a committed teacher of Developmental Biology, running courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the University of Sheffield. Her lab also makes regular contributions to outreach events, introducing the public to the beauty and logic of embryonic development.

Shankar Srinivas

Shankar is Professor of Developmental Biology and a Wellcome Senior Investigator in the Department of Physiology Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford [LINK].

He completed his BSc in Nizam College in Hyderabad, India. He then joined the group of Frank Costantini in Columbia University, New York, where he received a PhD for work on the molecular genetics of kidney development. Following this, he moved to the NIMR in Mill Hill, London, where he worked as a HFSPO fellow in the groups of Rosa Beddington and Jim Smith on how the anterior-posterior axis is established. Here, he developed time-lapse microscopy approaches to study early post-implantation mouse embryos, characterising the active migration of cells of the Anterior Visceral Endoderm that is essential for the correct orientation of the anterior posterior axis of the embryo.

In 2004 Shankar started his independent group at the University of Oxford as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow. His group has shown that the coordinated movement of AVE cells requires Planar Cell Polarity signalling and that a stereotypic multicellular-rosette arrangement of cells in the visceral endoderm is essential for normal AVE migration. Currently, the research in Shankar’s group focuses on two main areas. The first is to understand how the coordinated cell movements that shape the mammalian embryo prior to and during gastrulation are controlled. The second, more recent area is to understand how the heart starts to beat. Shankar’s group has shown that, during cardiogenesis, the cellular machinery for calcium oscillation matures before the sarcomeric machinery for contraction. Shankar’s group takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to address these questions, using techniques such as light-sheet and confocal time-lapse imaging, single cell approaches and embryo explant culture.

Shankar is also passionate about science outreach. His group participates regularly in science festivals, for which they have developed 3D printed models of developing embryos and a virtual reality based embryo and microscopy image volume explorer. For more information see Shankar’s public engagement page.

Jens Januschke

Jens is a Sir Henry Dale fellow at the School of Life Sciences at the university of Dundee running his lab in the division of Cell and Developmental Biology [LINK].

He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Cologne and moved for his PhD to the University Paris 7 where he got his degree in Genetics in the lab of Antoine Guichet, working on mRNA localization and microtubule-based transport in Drosophila oocytes trying to understand how the anterior posterior axis is specified in this system.

After his PhD he moved to the Institute for Biomedical Research (IRB) in Barcelona to start working with neural stem cells, called neuroblasts in the developing fly brain in the group of Cayetano González. During this time, he worked on asymmetric centrosome segregation and discovered that mother and daughter centrioles are differently distributed during asymmetric neuroblast division and shed light on the molecular mechanisms controlling this process. This work identified the first daughter centriole specific protein in Drosophila, called Centrobin.

In 2013, Jens started his own group in the cell and developmental biology division of the school of life sciences at the University of Dundee, for which he obtained a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship funded by Wellcome and the Royal Society. Currently, his group focusses on the cell biological mechanisms that control neuroblast asymmetric cell division, which includes studying the establishment of cell polarity, fate determinant localisation and spindle orientation. Jens has been involved in organizing the Scottish Developmental Biology group meeting twice in Dundee and is currently a co-organiser of the UK Workshop on Developmental Cell Biology of Drosophila.

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A deep look into the BSDB Archive reveals 70 years of our society’s and discipline’s history

April 29, 2018 comms Leave a comment

This year is the 70^th anniversary of the BSDB, an obvious occasion to look back at the society’s history. As the BSDB’s communications officer I felt a need to become proactive and started, a good three years ago, to investigate the society’s past – only to find a rather blank sheet, with the laudable exception of a published article by Jonathan Slack (Slack, 2000). In his article, Jonathan provides an overview of the early decades of our society: starting as “(London) Embryologists’ Club” in 1948 (notebook #2, p.2f.; Fig.1), renamed in 1964 into “Society for Developmental Biology” (SDB; notebook #1, p.28f.) and, eventually, into “British Society for Developmental Biology (BSDB)” in 1969 (to avoid confusion with the American partner society SDB). Apart from Jonathan’s article, there was no organised information about BSDB chairs, let alone officers or committee members of the last 70 years, nor about its conferences or potential educational or political activities. I therefore started a BSDB history project trying a number of strategies to unearth some of its past, which eventually led to the launch of the BSDB Archive.

**Fig. 1** Extracts from page 2 and 3 of the digitised notebook #2 documenting the birth hour of “The Embryologists’ Club” on February 19th 1948, with E.A. Fraser as chairman, Alan Fisk as secretary, Margaret Tribe as treasurer, and two further committee members.

A story of discovery

My first attempt to dig into the BSDB’s history was to contact former publications/communications officers of the last two to three decades. This yielded PDF files of newsletters covering the period since 2000. However, little newsletter information appeared to have been held for the period before that. Also former BSDB meetings officers could not help with sufficient relevant documents to reconstruct the conference history.

I also enquired at history archives. For example, the Wellcome Library holds conference documents of the years 1973, 1975, 1976, 1983, 1986-88. But these could only be viewed on-site and, if digitised, could not be made publicly available – hence another dead end.

Furthermore, I followed up on a hint that some old conferences were published as issue supplements in JEEM (precursor of the journal Development), but lengthy searches through Development’s online archive of the 70s and 80s revealed only one such issue (BSDB, 1984) – and this exact issue was also the only one we later found as a hard copy (1984-2). However, I learned that in the 80s and 90s it was a requirement for all invited speakers to provide a paper for publication in a JEEM or Development Supplement, something which all speakers seemed to have willingly agreed to. As Phil Ingham commented to me: “When you look at the calibre of speakers that provided these papers, you get a sense of the very high esteem in which the BSDB meetings were held – basically, all the top developmental biologists in the world wanted to be invited to our meetings (I am sure this is still true)“. Some examples of these special issues are linked out from our meeting documents 1987-3, 1988-1+2 and 1989-1+2.

Finally, I searched for former BSDB members and contacted them one by one. But I was usually informed that potentially helpful documents vanished when offices were cleared out upon retirement – a sign that it might in fact be too late for the BSDB history project.

Thomas Stoneman and a glance into the lower drawer of the archive.

Although none of the attempts yielded significant outcome reaching back into the last millennium, new hope arose when contacting Robert Kelsh (Secretary 2003-08) who pointed out that the same BSDB archive used by Jonathan Slack for his history article should still be with Michael Taylor (Secretary 2008-13) in Cardiff. A few days later, the archive was opened and it was agreed with the BSDB committee that Mike’s student, Thomas Stoneman, would be paid to sort through it and provide an overview. His findings revealed that we had struck gold! There were newsletters from 1979-2002 (#1 to #23-2), an almost complete list of meeting programs (and partly even abstracts) dating back to 1964, and hand-written or printed minutes of committee meetings starting with the foundation meeting in 1948, apart from membership indices of many different years, plenty of correspondence, meeting planning documents, financial statements and contemporary information about other societies, in particular ISDB and EDBO (Fig.1; for more details see the archive list and the archive-curiosities document).

**Fig.2** Logo design for the digital BSDB archive (Box 1).

Following our initial euphoria, in came the sobering thoughts of what to do with these materials – and proper archiving and digitisation was (and remains) the obvious ultimate goal. Upon consultation with Carsten Timmermann, science historian here at Manchester, I contacted libraries and history archives, but none of these attempts provided a satisfactory way forward. Pragmatic solutions had to be found, and it was eventually decided that Thomas would continue his work for a while and start digitising key documents including the notebooks of the (London) Embryologists’ Club, all newsletters, and part of the conference documents. I organised the files as they became available, uploaded them as “BSDB Archive” (BSDB comms account) on the free and indexed online repository figshare.com, and designed a specific logo for future branding (Fig.2). To close remaining gaps, Mike Taylor kindly hosted me for a day in June 2018 and, together with Thomas, we searched through the archive using rapid photo-documentation to digitise further interesting finds. Through all these efforts, an important fraction of our documents has now been made publicly available (Box 1).

Box 1. Current holdings of the BSDB archive

The Embryologists Club + SDB

Archive: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5899636 | SDB-1964| 1948-64(#2) | 1948-64(#1) | DOWNLOAD ALL

BSDB Newsletters

Archive: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5827359 | 2016+17(#37+38) | 2015(#36) | 2014(#35) | 2013(#34) | 2012(#33-2) | 2012(#33-1) | 2011(#32-2) | 2011(#32-1) | 2010(#31-2) | 2010(#31-1)| 2009(#30-2) | 2009(#30-1) | 2008(#29-2) | 2008(#29-1) | 2007(#28-2) | 2007(#28-1) | 2006(#27-2) | 2006(#27-1) | 2005(#26-2) | 2005(#26-1) | 2004(#25-2) | 2004(#25-1) | 2003(#24-2) | 2003(#24-1) | 2002(#23-2) | restart @ #23 | 2002-1(#45) | 2001-2(#44) | 2001-1(#43) | 2000-2(#42) | 2000-1(#41) | #40 missed out| 1999-2(#39) | 1999-1(#38) |1998(#37) | 1997-2(#36) | 1997-1(#35) | 1996-2(#34) | 1996-1(#33) | 1995-2(#32) | 1995-1(#31) | 1994-2(#30) | 1994-1(#29) | 1993-2(#28) | 1993-1(#27) | 1992-2(#26) | 1992-1(#25) | 1991-2(#24) | 1991-1(#23) | 1990-2(#22) | 1990-1(#21) | 1989-2(#20) | 1989-1(#19) | 1988-2(#18) | 1988-1(#17) | 1987-2(#16) | 1987-1(#15) | 1986-2(#14) | 1986-1(#13) | 1985-2(#12) | 1985-1(#11) | 1984-2(#10) | 1984-1(#9) | 1983(#8) | 1982-2(#7) | 1982-1(#6) | 1981-2(#5)| 1981-1(#4)| 1980-2(#3)| 1980-1(#2)| 1979(#1) | DOWNLOAD ALL

Meeting programs

Archive: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5899651 (* hard copies of abstracts available) | 2018-2 | 2018-1 | 2017-2 | 2017-1 | 2016-2| 2016-1 | 2015-2 | 2015-1 | 2014-3 | 2014-2 | 2014-1 | 2013-2 | 2013-1 | 2012-2 | 2012-1 | 2011-2 | 2011-1 | 2010-2 | 2010-1 | 2009 | 2008-2 | 2008-1 | 2007-2 | 2007-1 | 2006-1+2 | 2005-1+2 | 2004-1+2 | 2003-1+2 | 2002-1+2 | 2001-1+2 | 2000-1+2 | 1999-1+2 | 1998-1+2 | 1997-1+2 | 1996-1+2 | 1995-1+2 | 1994-2 | 1994-1 | 1993-2 | 1993-1 | 1992-1+2 | 1991-1+2 | 1990-1+2 | 1989-1+2 | 1988-1+2 | 1987(EDBO) | 1987-3* | 1987-2 | 1987-1* | 1986-2 | 1986-1 | 1985-2* | 1985-1* | 1984-2 | 1984-1 | 1983-2 | 1983-1 | 1982-2 | 1982-1 | 1981-2 | 1981-1 | 1980-2 | 1980-1 | 1979-2 | 1979-1 | 1979-84 | 1978(#38) | 1978(#37)* | 1977(SSF)| 1977(#36) | 1977(#35) | 1977(#34) | 1976(#33) | 1976(#32) | 1976(#31) | 1975(#30) | 1975(#29) | 1975(#28) | 1973/4(#25-27)| 1972(#24) | 1972(#23) | 1971(#22) | 1971(#21) | 1971(#20) | 1970(SEB+SDB) | 1970(#18) | 1970(#17) | 1969(#16) | 1969(#15) | 1969(#14) | 1968(#13) | 1968(SEB+SDB) | 1968(#11) | 1967(#10) | 1967(#9) | 1966(#8) | 1966(#7) | 1966(#6) | 1965(#5) | 1965(#4) | 1965(#3) | 1964(#2) | 1964(#1) | DOWNLOAD ALL

Lessons learned so far

Clearly, I am not a historian, but even a lay person can sense the value of the BSDB archive. Here, I share some of my own thoughts and observations that arose when archiving the materials and browsing through them. And I will also explain some of my ideas of how to make practical use of the documents.

The BSDB newsletters

Newsletters are an essential pillar of scientific societies or communities (Kelty, 2012). They reveal a lot about a society’s nature and areas of engagement, and this perspective is now provided for the BSDB reaching back four decades. As shown in Box 1, BSDB newsletter #1 was published in 1979, and we hold an almost complete list of issues since then, with only 3 issues missing from this entire period! Initially, the newsletters were numbered individually up to issue #45 in 2002. From then on, the numbering occurred as single volume per year with summer and autumn editions sub-numbered as 1 and 2; consequently issue #46 was replaced by #23-2, as if newsletters had been numbered by year from start, thus making it possible to calculate the publication year and issue of previous newsletters in retrospect (A. Furley, pers. comm.; footnote in Newsletter #23-2, 2000, p.1). Since 2013, during my time as communications officer, publication has been reduced to only one newsletter per year. This latter change reflects the fact that information is now made available in more timely fashion on the BSDB website and on The Node, so that newsletters have changed into legacy items rather than carriers of urgent news and information (see editorial of Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17).

Another obvious trend is the dramatic improvement of editing and printing technology (from type writer to computer, from black-and-white print to colour; Fig. 3), as well as the advent of the internet which becomes obvious during the first two years of the millennium. The first BSDB website address (http://www.ana.ed.ac.uk/BSDB) is mentioned in issue #44 (2000, p.5), which then changed into today’s bsdb.org in issue #23-2 (2002, p.2), followed by several issues alerting people to the fact that the new website exists. To my surprise, I could not find any dedicated article introducing the BSDB website to the community. Shortly after, a website co-ordinator was introduced on the committee (see Appendix), first represented by Kate Storey (2003-4) followed by Andrew Jarman (2004-5), who then became publication secretary and website co-ordinator rolled into one (2005-10); this combined task was thereafter renamed into “communications officer”. After the turn of the millennium, web links were increasingly used in many contexts, paralleled by the disappearance of paper versions of important forms (e.g. to register for conferences, apply for travel grants or submit abstracts – which had often been grouped together in the so called “centre section”). Before the advent of the internet, it made a lot of sense to provide these forms in newsletters because it helped to reduce the burden of postage; as Phil Ingham explained to me of his time as publication officer (1991-95): he needed to get ~700 newsletters printed, stuffed into envelopes and sent out one-by-one.

**Fig. 3** Two examples of newsletter cover images

When browsing through the newsletters, there are obvious phases where the emphasis lies on different forms of contents, likely due to the personal preferences of officers and chairs in charge. For example, there are periods where meeting reports are a regular feature, whereas they are completely absent at other times. Constant elements that feature in almost all newsletters throughout four decades include: (1) meeting announcements (see below for more detail); (2) lists of officers and committee members of the time (see Appendix); (3) obituaries and book reviews – although they gradually vanished during the last years likely due to the advent of The Node as a “modern newsletter” for the wider community of cell and developmental biologists covering much of the more general news (Vicente et al., 2017; see editorial of Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17); (4) reports (or at least mentions) of the winners of society awards, i.e. the Waddington medal since 1998, Beddington medal since 2004, Cheryll Tickle medal and Dennis Summerbell Lecture award since 2016.

To start capitalising on newsletters as a unique source of information, I have linked BSDB medal winners listed on our website to the newsletters which contain the respective reports/mentions of awardees. I feel that this does not only provide evidence for the otherwise anecdotal lists, but it also enriches them with contemporary views about the awardees’ achievements. Furthermore, I extracted a list of officers on the committee (see Appendix), as well as meeting information (see below for more detail); the latter includes existing meeting reports which are now part of the documents listed under “Meeting programs” (Box 1) and provide insightful contemporary views about those events. Obituaries are further valuable documents of the time which should be made accessible; for example I inserted Ed Lewis’ obituary (Newsletter #25/2, 2004, p.8) in a link collection of Drosophila research history articles, or Rosa Beddington’s obituary (Newsletter #43, 2001, p.13) on the BSDB’s Beddington medal page.

But there are many examples of interesting further discoveries that I came across. First of all, the newsletter does not restrict to BSDB-specific information, but it provides a wider insight by reporting community-relevant news of the time, such as new editors of subject-related journals, prizes in the field, conferences of other societies, etc. (i.e. the kind of information that is well covered these days by The Node; Vicente et al., 2017). Some contents touch on topics of political or societal relevance still debated these days. For example, Newletter #23-2 (2002, p.6) mentioned a plenary lecture at the BSCB/BSDB Spring meeting in Warwick in 2003 entitled “Government support for world class science” given by Lord Sainsbury of Turnville (then Government Minister for Science and Innovation); Kate Storey reported on a meeting entitled ‘“Women on Top”, Reflections on Women in Science’ (Newletter #23-2, 2002, p.10); or some pieces reflected on the newly emerging PLoS journals and the wider question of open access (Newsletters #24-1, 2003, p.3 and #27-2, 2006, p.8).

Also relevant in this context are contributions about science communication and advocacy. For example, the article entitled ‘The headless tadpole affair” (Newsletter #36, 1997, p.1) described a misleading press release about the rather forward-looking topic of mammalian organ cultures, and touches on the dangers of interacting with the media (“never get entangled with the media without some training“). Newsletter #41 (2000, p.3) contains a report about the UK Life Sciences Committee (UKLSC), a joint forum for UK bioscience societies aiming to speak “with one voice to the media, the government and the research councils, for the things we need and want”. Paul Martin acted as the BSDB liaison followed by Guy Tear. One of its legacies was the speakers database (www.biology4all.com) which still continues to lead a cryptic life. More importantly, the UKLSC merged into the Bioscience Federation in 2002 (Newsletter #23-2. 2002, p.3f.), which then combined with the Institute of Biology into the (Royal) Society of Biology in 2009 – and the BSDB became a member society in 2016 (Newsletter #36-2, 2015, p.23). In spite of all these efforts to promote biology in society, the above mentioned report in Newsletter #41 about the UKLSC reads rather sobering from today’s perspective: “There is an ongoing programme to aid quality science education in schools and the UKLSC sponsors school level videos on topics like genetic engineering so that in 10 years time we’ll all have PhD students who know significantly more than we do before they even start their bench work!” That the topic of education was taken with great enthusiasm at the time, is also reflected in the creation of education officer posts on the BSDB committee which were held by David Wilkinson (2002-2006) and Corinne Houart (2003-2007) – but these posts were not continued thereafter.

Another highlight of science communication is Ann Lackie’s article “Taking the anoraks out of fiction” (Newsletter #26-1, 2005, p.5), about the need to establish dialogue and collaboration between fiction writers and scientists, later formalised in the SciTalk initiative and website which is still live. Also the various experiments with sci-art fall into this category. Newsletter #42 (2000) shows a glass window termed “Window on Life” with Developmental Biology motifs. It was a collaboration between the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at Guy’s, Jim Cohen (Kings’ and St. Thomas’ Hospital) and the glass artist Carole Nunes. The window was installed in the north wing link corridor at St Thomas’ (any news of its present existence?). Other examples are the inclusions of sci-art exhibitions at the York Spring Meeting in 2002 (Newsletter #45, 2002, p.2 & back cover; announced in the previous newsletter) and at the Autumn Meeting 2016 in Edinburgh, where chimaera- and embryo-inspired artwork was on display (Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17, p.14). The sci-art exhibition in York prompted Phil Ingham to comment on science in society: “If the public are prepared to put their hands in their pockets to support the arts or sport, why then should they not be persuaded to support science in a similar way?” (Newsletter #23-2, 2002, p.10). Unfortunately, this topic remains as important today as it was then, and this is clearly demonstrated by the current advocacy campaign which was initiated by the BSDB together with the Company of Biologists (Maartens et al., 2018; Prokop, 2018; several articles in Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17).

An internal communications issue observed over the decades is the attempt to integrate graduate students into society life (Fig.4). For example, a graduate student meeting at the Edinburgh conference in 1981 is mentioned in Newsletter #5 (1981, p.7), and there was an announcement of a PhD student conference in Autumn 1999 – although I could not spot any traces thereafter confirming that this meeting had taken place or reflecting on its success. Furthermore, there were attempts to animate PhD students to write for the newsletter (Newsletter #23-2, 2002, p.5), which then happened for a short while starting in 2003 (Newsletter #24-1, 2003, p.6). This was further promoted also by an announcement to pay students a £50 reward for writing meeting reports (Newsletter #23-2, 2002, p.10; Fig.4). An important step was taken with the inclusion of student representatives on the committee starting in 1987, joined by a postdoc representative in 2015, which eventually led to the introduction of a separate webpage for young members (Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17, p.35). The importance of uncovering this particular part of the society’s history became clear to me during an engaging conversation I had with our newly elected postgraduate representative, Jessica Forsyth (2018-21); learning the mere fact that she has become part of a thirty year history sparked enormous enthusiasm and the immediate idea to get in contact with former graduate representatives.

**Fig. 4** Attempts to animate students to actively contribute to BSDB newsletters and activities.

A further interesting read are the articles announcing and explaining the introduction of new society awards and medals, such as the Waddington medal (Newsletter #36, 1997, p.9; Fig.5 – to recognise contributions both to the field and to the Developmental Biology community in the UK), the Beddington medal to honour Rosa Beddington who had tragically died of cancer aged 45 in May 2001 (Newletter #23-2, 2002, p.2 – to recognise the achievements of PhD students), the Gurdon Summer Studentships (Newsletter #35, 2014, p.10 – to allow undergraduates to work in a lab over summer), the Cheryll Tickle medal (Newsletter #36, 2015, p.14 – to recognise achievements of female researches at their mid-stage career), and the Dennis Summerbell Lecture award (Newsletter #37/38, 2016/17, p.47 – to honour good work by postdoctoral rsearchers).

**Fig. 5** First presentation of the Waddington medal design on the cover page of Newsletter #36 from 1997.

New to me was the origin of the BSDB logo, announced as a competition in 2001 (Newsletter #43, 2001, p.7). Out of 18 submissions, the design by Jeff Christiansen was the clear winner (Newsletter #44, 2001, p.25; Fig.6; logos). As Christiane Ruhrberg’s explained at her Cheryll Tickle medal lecture at the 2018 Spring meeting, she was the first person ever to have seen the logo, since Jeff stayed at her house when he designed it. – and it is little anecdotes like this that bring history to life.

**Fig. 6** Jeff Christiansen’s designs that won the BSDB logo competition (Newsletter #44, 2001, p.25)

Each time I look at an issue, I stumble across other interesting features, and there will be many other topics and events worth reporting, such as the gradual development of scientific questions, themes and methodologies, the BSDB’s financial history, the development of its close and unique relationship with the Company of Biology, or little anecdotes such as the food poisoning at the York Spring Meeting in 2001 (Newsletter #45, 2002, p.2) which are also part of our society’s history. This said, the newsletters are now publicly available, and new discoveries can be made by anyone taking an interest! But please, be so kind to share your findings!

The BSDB Meeting programs

The current archive contains digitised meeting programs covering most of the meetings, from the inaugural conference of the newly formed SDB in 1964 (meeting #1) through to the present. Where no meeting schedules were encountered (although they may still be hidden somewhere in the materials!), I could retrieve a lot of detailed information from the newsletters covering the period after 1996 (although relevant conference information became less detailed in newsletters after 2002, likely due to the availability of programs online that are now lost). For conferences since 2007, I could often retrieve further information from organisers who still kept relevant files – and it might be a worthwhile effort to write to former conference organisers more systematically to unearth the occasional stock of documents collecting dust on shelves or in filing cabinets.

**Fig. 7** Newsletter covers from 1993, 1995 and 1996 showing illustrations for meetings of the time which might reflect the actual meeting posters.

Meetings often start featuring in newsletters about 2-3 years leading up to the conference, and interesting planning developments can be observed during this period. For example, initial announcements of the Spring Meeting 2000 were entitled “Cell death and proliferation” which then refined into “Pattern formation and control of cell number”; or the Spring Meeting of 2002 started off as “Evolution & development” which then turned into “Evolution of developmental mechanisms”. Reconstructing the meeting history from newsletters also led to the addition of insightful meeting reports, and also a number of poster designs resurfaced in this way (Fig.7) – all added to our downloadable meeting documents.

**Fig. 8** Phil Ingham and Jonathan Cooke, organisers of the 1988 BSDB Spring Symposium, pose together at the 70th anniversary Spring meeting in 2018.

In general, the recovered documents will be an exciting resource for those who attended or organised those meetings, and part of that excitement came across at the 70^th anniversary Spring meeting in 2018 (Fig. 8). But the conference documents also provide an important insight into the scientific topics that dominated the field at any given time. They offer an opportunity for young developmental biologists to understand the historical roots of their specific sub-fields – and perhaps the surprising revelation that many questions they address today were already asked long before they got into science. The documents also make transparent which other societies the BSDB collaborated with over the years.

**Fig. 9** Nick Hopwood showing an image of the early committee meeting notes during his talk about the history of Developmental Biology at the BSDB Spring meeting 2018

The early meeting notes

The hand-written meeting notes are the archive documents which are least accessible to a lay person, but might likely be the most interesting ones for historians (Fig.9). The two note books of the “The (London) Embryologists’ Club” digitised so far, cover meeting minutes of the time from its foundation in 1948 to its transition into the SDB in 1964 (Box 1). Book #1 covers mainly committee meetings, and book #2 predominantly scientific symposia and their associated general society meetings. The precise dates for the various minutes tend to be provided at the start of each entry, and meetings are usually signed off with date on the next meeting, providing a complementary means to deduce or confirm dates. Using these materials, Jonathan Slack extracted a brief overview of this period (Slack, 2000), but more work will be required. For example, they will enable us to partly reconstruct the early conference history before 1964 (i.e. the period not covered by current meeting documents; Box 1; archive list), and I already extracted a list of early presidents/chairs, officers (Appendix). Another interesting addition is the little rule book of the newly founded SDB (SDB-1964), to which we added some documents illustrating the transition process and the thoughts leading up to it.

Conclusions, your contributions, final home for the archive

Here I have explained the story behind the digital BSDB Archive and provided my personal view of its contents, relevance and potential applications. The BSDB will likely not go further with the digitisation, but has undertaken different steps to make its contents available. Thus, the Historical Collections of the John Innes Centre (collections.jic.ac.uk) has kindly offered to host and curate the BSDB archive, where it is now available side-by-side with the Genetics Society’s archive – a potential treasure to perform comparative studies into science history.

I hope that the “open source” nature of the BSDB Archive will attract wider interest and inspire others to join in and help develop its full potential – be it biologists browsing around, or (hobby) historians making systematic scientific use of it (Fig.10). As Carsten Timmermann wrote from his perspective as science historian: “Your archive is a little treasure trove and will enable us to understand the history of Developmental Biology in this country much better. I wish other societies would follow your example. If we had a whole set of similar archives at our disposal, this would help us to study the way the life sciences overall have developed, comparing and contrasting sub-disciplines and understanding trends. For example, one could look at conference programmes in different fields within the life sciences and study how molecular methods have transformed biology.”

**Fig. 10** Tweet by Cheryl Lancaster historian from Durham working on the history of stem cell science

I would like to finish this blog post by asking your help: if you read or study documents of the archive and gain any new insights, recall anecdotes, have additional background knowledge that complements available information, or realise that you hold any additional documents that might help to fill remaining gaps, please be so kind to contact comms@bsdb.org and let us know – it will be a helpful contribution to the wider understanding of the history of our society and field in general.

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References

British Society of Developmental Biology (BSDB) (1984). European Developmental Biology Congress (abstracts). J Embryol Exp Morphol Suppl. 1, 1-271 – [LINK]

Kelty, C. M. (2012). This is not an article: Model organism newsletters and the question of `open science’. BioSocieties 7, 140-68 – [LINK]

Maartens, A., Prokop, A., Brown, K., Pourquié, O. (2018). Advocating developmental biology. Development 145 — [LINK]

Prokop, A. (2018). What is Developmental Biology – and why is it important? Open Access Govern 17, 121-123 – [LINK]

Slack, J. M. (2000). A short history of the British Society for Developmental Biology. Int J Dev Biol 44, 79-83 — [LINK]

Vicente, C., Maartens, A., Brown, K. (2017). The Node and beyond – using social media in cell and developmental biology. Sem Cell Dev Biol — [LINK]

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Appendix:

BSDB chairs & officers since 1948

This list was extracted from the digitised newsletters, note books and committee/general meeting minutes (Box 1; early officers). The precise years of transition between consecutive officers were not always easy to establish and might need further refinement.

**Fig.11** Description of the roles of BSDB officers (Newsletter #1, 1979, p.2)

Chairs and presidents

Paul Martin (chair, 2019-2024)
Ottoline Leyser (chair, 2014-2019)
Elizabeth Robertson (chair, 2009-2014)
Matthew Freeman (chair, 2004-2009)
Phil Ingham (chair, 1999-2004)
Jim Smith (chair, 1994-1999)
Michael Akam (chair, 1989-1994)
Martin Johnson (chair, 1984-1989)
Chris Graham (chair, 1979-1984) – president: David R. Newth
Anne McLaren (1975-1979)
Michael Abercrombie (1970-75 – thereafter Honorary President)
David R. Newth (chair 1963-69)
William J. Hamilton (chair 1951-63)
John Dixon Boyd (chair, 1950)
E.A. Fraser (chair; 1948-50)
James P. Hill (first president; 1948-54)

Secretaries:

Tristan Rodriguez (2023-2028)
Megan Davey (2018-23)
Kim Dale (2013-18)
Mike Taylor (2008-13)
Robert Kelsh (2003-08)
Ivor Mason (1998-2003)
Jonathan Slack (1993-98)
Peter Thorogood (1988-93)
Chris Ford (1984-88)
Michael Balls (ca. 1978-1983; last 4 years Secretary/Treasurer)
John McKenzie (1975-ca.78)
J.C. Campbell (ca.1971-75)
Frank Billett (1967-ca.71)
Elizabeth M. Deuchar (1962-67)
Alan Fisk (1950-62)

Treasurer

Tom Bennett (2024-2029)
Cynthia Andoniadou (2019-2024)
Christopher Thompson (2014-19)
Andrew Fleming (2009-2014)
Guy Tear (2004–2009)
Ottoline Leyser (1999-2004)
Jonathan Bard (1994-99)
Liz Jones (1989-94)
Mary Bownes (1984-1989)
Michael Balls (ca.1979-84; Secretary/Treasurer)
J.R. Hinchliffe (ca.75-ca.79)
J. McKenzie (ca.1970-ca.75)
Alan Fisk (ca.1965-ca.70)
E.W. Baxter (1960-ca.65)
R.J. O’Connor (1950?-59)
Margaret Tribe (1948-50?)

Programme/Meetings secretary/officer

Shankar Srinivas (2023-28)
Sally Lowell (2018-23)
Joshua Brickman (2013-18)
James Briscoe (2008-2013)
Nancy Papalopulu (2003-2008)
Jamie Davies (1998-2003)
Ian Jackson (1993-98)
Rosa Beddington (1991-93)
Nigel Holder (1985-91)
Mike Snow (1981-85)
W.D. Billington (1976-81)
D.A. Ede (ca.1973-1976)

Publications secretary/Website co-ordinator/Communications officers

Raman Das (2023-28, communication)
Ben Steventon (2018-23, communication)
Andreas Prokop (2013-18, communication)
Malcolm Logan (2010-13, communication)
Andrew Jarman (2004-5 web, 2005-10 publications & web)
Kate Storey (2003-4, web)
Andy Furley (2000-05)
Vernon French (1995-2000)
Phil Ingham (1991-95)
Jim Smith (1986-91)
Chris Wylie (1984-86; before assistant secretary/treasurer)

Graduate/Student representative

Tamina Level (2021-24)
Jessica Forsyth (2018-21)
Alexandra Ashcroft (2015-18)
Magdalena Stasiulewicz (2013-2015)
Jorge Beira (2011-2013)
Hayden Selvadurai (2009-2011)
Gareth Powell (2007-2009)
Raphaëla Kitson-Pantano (2005-2007)
Caroline Parkin (2003-2005)
Leigh Wilson (2001-2003)
Alison Wilkie (1998-2001)
Marcus Hicks (1996-98, joint)
Louise Smith (1996-98, joint)
— vacant —
Richard Twyman (1994)
Emily Gale (1991-94)
Karen Jacques (1987-91)

Postdoc representative

Anahi Binaugi-Casas (2021-26)
Charlotte Sophie Louise Bailey (2018-21)
Michelle Ware (2015-18)

Education officer

David Wilkinson (2002-2006)
Corinne Houart (2003-2007)

Awards, Meetings, News

Daniyal Jafree winner of the BSDB advocacy writing competition

April 17, 2018 comms Leave a comment

In preparation of the 70^th anniversary celebrations at the special Spring Meeting in Warwick (15-18 April 2018), the student and postdoc representatives of the BSDB, Alexandra Ashcroft and Michelle Ware, initiated a writing competition for graduate student and postdoc members who were asked to write a max 500 word piece on one of the following topics:

The future of Developmental Biology
What Developmental Biology has contributed to society
The experiment/paper in Developmental Biology that most inspired you

12 excellent submission entered the competition and were judged by Katherine Brown, Aidan Maartens, Ottoline Leyser and Jonathan Slack. The first prize, a free trip to and attendance of the 77^th Annual Society of Developmental Biology meeting (Portland, Oregon, USA) was announced at the Spring Meeting’s conference dinner. The BSDB would like to congratulate the winner Daniyal Jafree (@daniyal_jafree). Please, read below and let yourself inspire by the submissions we received.

The winner Daniyal Jafree is a medical 1^st year PhD student working on the project “Unravelling the origins of the kidney lymphatics” in the group of Dr David Long at UCL. In his piece he writes about a paper by Paul Riley from 2015 which addresses the development and function of the cardiac lymphatic system. Danyial’s piece is a wonderful example of how good DB research has induced a paradigm shift in the cardiac field, but also profoundly changed the career of a young researcher. As Danyial writes at the end: “This paper inspired me so much that I contacted Professor Riley to ask whether he had any free positions in this lab. Sadly, he didn’t. But, funnily enough, I am now tackling a PhD in lymphatic biology at my own university, integrated into my medical degree. And guess who I’m collaborating with!”

Laura Hankins (runner up; Dunn school, Oxford) relates childhood memories of observing newts at the pond with the transplantation experiments performed in newts by Hilde Mangold and Hans Spemann – the experiments that sparked Laura’s interest in Dev Biol. She reminds us of the fact that our science is more than the focus on disease and sustainability, but concerns true biology and the wonders of nature around us. And she alerts our technology-focussed minds to the fact that there is an art and beauty in experimental design whatever method we use. As Laura comments towards the end: “This experiment is inspiring partly due to the minimalism of its approach; it demonstrates that the most influential experiments are designed without unnecessary embellishment.”

Victoria Rook (runner up; PhD at Queen Mary, London) takes a very different, critical view at the future, elegantly framed by comparing current developments in cloning and the use of chimerae and genomic engineering to the dystopian science fiction book “Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood. Weighing optimism against pessimism, she ends with the words: “Soon we will have the resources to cure numerous genetic diseases and, in theory, the ability to improve the lives and health of generations to come. The unease comes with how far we are liable to take this, is a dystopian future where ‘pigoons’ and ‘crakers’ run wild within our reach, or will they remain a thing of fiction?”

See also a selection further submissions:

Kane Toh Qin uses Conrad Waddington epigenetic landscape proposed in the 1940s as an example to project from the past to the presence and beyond.

Emilio Mendez describes how learning about limb bud transplantation experiments performed by Ross G. Harrison in the 1920 inspired his passion for Developmental Biology.

Amanda Berg looks at the future of humans in space and the colonisation of other planets, and the need to investigate the possibility of reproduction and embryonic development away from earth.

Caitlin McQueen describes how she was influenced by the publications on nuclear transfer experiments carried out by John Gurdon in Xenopus laevis intestinal cells.

Massimo Ganassi talks about the difficulty and importance of communicating our science.

Anna Klucnika alerts to the need of communicating DB and provides some thoughts how to do it.

Sandra G González Malagon asks the fundamental question of what DB has contributed to society.

The paper in Developmental Biology that most inspired me (winner)

Daniyal Jafree

As a medical student into Developmental Biology, it bugged me when my friends asked: “Why Developmental Biology? That’s boring, and not relevant to medicine at all?” For me, there is no paper that disproves this greater than that published by Paul Riley and colleagues from the University of Oxford, in Nature in June 2015¹. This paper, representing eight years of work, examined the development and function of the cardiac lymphatics. Together with two other papers published at around the same period, Riley and his group overturned a 100-year old dogma in lymphatic biology within the space of about 12 months, and laid the foundation for a new therapeutic strategy for heart disease.

Lymphatic biology is a very hot topic. These vessels, at the interface between vascular and immune systems, have been implicated in cancer, obesity, hypertension, inflammatory diseases and beyond. Lymphatics supposedly arise from a single source. A subset of cells in the wall of the cardinal vein express markers of lymphatic fate specification early in development. These cells bud off, form lymphatic sacs, and reach out to produce the entire lymphatic system. At least that is what we thought.

Riley and his group performed Cre-based lineage tracing to capture the venous-derived lymphatics in the heart. Remarkably, not all of the cardiac lymphatics were labelled. So where on earth were these non-venous derived cells coming from? The group went ‘all out’, using a battery of Cre lines in a painstaking effort to capture these mysterious cells. The answer was shocking: they were not coming from the heart, nor the embryo at all! They were coming from outside the embryo, from haemogenic endothelium in the primitive yolk sac. That yellowish bag-looking thing that I always dissected and disregarded when doing my own experiments.

But Riley and his group didn’t stop there. Given the importance of the lymphatics in fluid homeostasis and inflammation, they were reasoned to have a role in cardiovascular disease, one of the biggest killers in the modern world. The team took lymphatic reporter mice and induced cardiac injury, by tying off a key artery supplying the myocardium. Lymphatic vessels expanded, and this growth occurs via the same programmes that drive lymphatic expansion in development. Using magnetic resonance imaging (which, as a medical student, I had no idea was possible in mice), they showed that treatment with a lymphangiogenic growth factor improved heart function after cardiac injury.

This paper isn’t my favourite solely because it challenged an age-old hypothesis, and did so robustly by using multiple parallel experimental strategies. It’s also the link it makes to a common disease process, and the manipulation the same programmes that drive lymphatic development to halt this process. This paper inspired me so much that I contacted Professor Riley to ask whether he had any free positions in this lab. Sadly, he didn’t. But, funnily enough, I am now tackling a PhD in lymphatic biology at my own university, integrated into my medical degree. And guess who I’m collaborating with!

References

Klotz et al. (2015). Cardiac lymphatics are heterogeneous in origin and respond to injury. Nature, 522: 62-67.

Daniyal’s acceptance speech:

“I’m grateful to be receiving this prize from the BSDB, and I’m actually baffled I won, considering I’ve never had any formal teaching in developmental biology. I’m a medical student with no clear indication as to what clinical specialty I want to pursue, but with a strong interest in developmental biology. Unfortunately, I think I’m in the minority. I have lost count of the number of times that non-basic science-trained clinicians ask me about my interests, and when I respond, their faces screw up as if they have taken a large bite from a lemon.

Through my clinical career so far, I’ve always found myself coming back to developmental biology, with the support of the BSDB. First, as part of an integrated BSc degree during medical school, after which the BSDB supported my attendance at a conference in Chicago. Later in 2016, as part of a BSDB-funded summer studentship. And now, being supported by my medical school to do a PhD in lymphatic development, alongside my medical studies.

I think there is so much the clinical world has to learn from developmental biology, about birth defects, cancer, regenerative medicine and beyond. The paper I wrote about in my essay is just one incredible example of developmental biology’s potential. This paper, published in Nature by Paul Riley’s group in Oxford, showed that cardiac lymphatics develop in a completely unexpected way and, with two other papers published the same year, overturned a 100-year old dogma in lymphatic development. Riley and colleagues went on to show that tinkering with the same pathways that drive lymph vessel growth in development, can be used to manipulate lymph vessel growth to benefit cardiovascular disease. This is why it is undoubtedly my favourite scientific paper, since its publication in 2015.

I really hope, one day, I can forge a career that brings the clinical world and developmental biology closer together. So thanks to the BSDB and the massive support it’s provided me over the years, as you have given me hope that such a career can, and will, happen. And, of course, thank you again for this amazing prize.”

Painting the embryo by numbers: how nature provided the tools for an inspirational experiment (runner up)

Laura Hankins

Visit a local pond and lie flat on your stomach, allowing the soft mud to seep into your clothes. Be sure to bring a jam jar; it will sparkle in the lazy spring sunlight as you shift it closer to the water’s edge. Wait patiently, observing any disturbances to the dappled surface. There! The flat tail of a newt in the breeding season.

Pleurodelinae is an unassuming collection of newt species within the Salamander family. As a child, sitting by the pond in our front garden, I was often charmed by the sedate movements of common newts contrasting with the constant hum of traffic whipping past. I think I probably wanted to hunt for new species in undiscovered rainforests, as this seemed a reasonable career move at the time. Little did I know that the humble newt would reappear in a university lecture, starring in an experiment that inspired me to pursue Cell and Developmental Biology.

It is 1924. In Hans Spemann’s laboratory, our friends the newts have been the subject of a series of experiments performed by Hilde Mangold as part of her doctoral studies. Spemann was no stranger to amphibians; his work on eye development had made good use of frogs. Now he had turned his attention to how broader embryonic regions are defined.

During gastrulation, the embryo folds in on itself to produce three distinct layers that will ultimately have different fates. This produces the blastopore, an opening that acts like an insatiable mouth as the embryo consumes itself. Spemann, amongst others, had observed that transplanting tissue from the blastopore lip into another embryo resulted in the formation of a second neural tube and its surrounding structures. Many assumed that these features arose exclusively from the donor cells, but Spemann and others hypothesised that these cells could be acting as an ‘organiser’, signaling to influence their neighbours’ fates. But how to test this suggestion?

The breakthrough came with an idea that was beautiful in its simplicity. Mangold repeated the transplantation experiments but moved the tissue between different newt species. These newts had distinct pigmentations, so it would be possible to discern host from donor tissue after leaving the embryo to develop following surgery. In 1924, embryos left for sufficient time developed a chimeric conjoined twin with its own neural tube, notochord and somites. After sectioning, Mangold observed that these structures contained both pigmented and unpigmented cells. Remarkably, it seemed Spemann was right: the transplanted tissue had somehow altered the fate of the surrounding host cells, coopting them into forming an artificial twin.

This experiment is inspiring partly due to the minimalism of its approach; it demonstrates that the most influential experiments are designed without unnecessary embellishment. Yet its surgical element made it incredibly technically complicated. Thanks to their logical design, and the natural features of newts, Spemann and Mangold changed our perception of cell fate determination. Years later, researchers are still being inspired to use knowledge of the natural world to address questions at the cellular level.

Is the future of developmental biology written in science fiction? (runner up)

Victoria Rook

As a developmental biologist and devoted reader of dystopian science fiction, I frequently wonder how often these two things overlap, when will fiction become fact and fact mirror fiction? A couple of years ago I came across a fantastic book, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake¹. This book is set in a desolate, dystopian future that arose as a consequence of biotechnology corporations taking genetic engineering to extremes. The accountable corporations created many chimeric animals, one magnificently named example are the ‘pigoons’;

“The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of fool-proof human

tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host….¹”

In January 2017, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte at the SALK institute, California, published a paper in Cell titled; Interspecies chimerism with human pluripotent stem cells². In this article, Belmonte introduced human stem cells into pre-implantation pig embryos. Chimeric human-pig embryos were then implanted into female pig recipients and developed for four weeks before analysis. The ultimate objective of this research is to grow replacement organs in pigs for human transplant. Unfortunately, Belmonte did not credit Atwood for her conceptual influence and, more disappointingly, there is no mention of ‘pigoons’ throughout the paper.

Atwood also describes a superior human species, the ‘crakers’, which were developed as prototypes of what could be available to those willing to pay top dollar for ‘genetically perfect’ children. A decade later, Feng Zhang’s group in Harvard were the first to report CRISPR-Cas9 mediated genome editing³. Shortly after, in 2015, Junjiu Huang’s group in China used this CRISPR-Cas9 technology to carry out targeted genome editing in human embryos⁴ with the intent to treat β-thalassemia. More recently, Kathy Niakan, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London, has obtained a HFEA license to use CRISPR-Cas9 technology to manipulate the human embryo genome in order to study early development. Understandably none of these embryos have been, or will be implanted into human recipients, but how far away are we from being able to create Atwood’s ‘crakers’?

Oryx and Crake is one prophetic example where fiction has seemingly ‘foretold the future’, posing questions about how much can we learn about the future of developmental biology from science fiction? Aristotle showed us model organisms could be used to study development, however, given innovations in CRISPR-Cas9 technology and ongoing discoveries of evolutionary developmental differences between species, is it likely that model organisms will become a thing of the past and CRISPR-engineered human embryos pave the way of the future? Whilst this may sound like a pessimistic prognosis for the future of developmental biologists working with model organisms, I am actually very excited for what the future holds. Soon we will have the resources to cure numerous genetic diseases and, in theory, the ability to improve the lives and health of generations to come. The unease comes with how far are we liable to take this, is a dystopian future where ‘pigoons’ and ‘crakers’ run wild within our reach, or will they remain a thing of fiction?

References

Atwood, M. Oryx and Crake. (Bloomsbury, 2003).
Wu, J. et al. Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells. Cell 168, 473–486.e15 (2017).
Cong, L. et al. Multiplex genome engineering using CRISPR/Cas systems. Science (80-. ). 339, 819–824 (2013).
Liang, P. et al. CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygotes. Protein Cell 6, 363–372 (2015).

Does developmental biology have a future?

Anna Klucnika

Last year I marched the streets of London with thousands of other science enthusiasts, as many more thousands did so in other cities across the globe. The reason? Politics has gotten in the way of science and the public is, apparently, tired of experts.

With funding plummeting in the UK and already slashed in the US, the future of research is unclear. There is increasing pressure from the public, funding bodies and governments for biological research to focus on questions that generate click-bait headlines claiming a disease cause or cure. Research with direct applications for human health and disease is unequivocally important. However, recent funding trends reveal that basic biological research is being institutionally neglected. This will leave huge collections of questions unanswered. Many of these questions would have lead onto findings with broad implications that could have revolutionised human health.

Developmental biology is one such science that is often perceived to have little implication on the lives of the majority of the population. Developmental biology is the study of how cells make tissues, organs and organisms. This humble field has led to many discoveries with worldwide impact, for instance cloning, understanding birth defects and optimising IVF. Nevertheless, developmental biology is persistently undervalued. Research using animals that are more commonly known as pests was always going to be a hard sell.

In walks Developmental Biology’s sexier cousin: stem cell and organoid biology. Really, these two scientific fields are more likely sisters. Both ask the same question (how do cells make organs), but stem cell and organoid biology inherently has more of a focus on research with direct therapeutic applications. Organoids can be used to aid our understanding of organ growth and tumorigenesis, to screen for drugs and may potentially enable us to grow organs for transplantation and so is attractive to funders and, crucially, the public.

To grab the public’s attention, Developmental Biologists need to learn from the organoid field and showcase the research that has fast-track therapeutic potential. Old school developmental biologists whose careers blossomed when curiosity-driven science was enough will be severely offended by this statement. But scientific culture has dramatically changed. We are in an era of information overloaded in which headlines are updated every minute, not day. Sexy science thrives in this environment, whilst the less-glamorous fields are quickly forgotten.

To stay in the game, Developmental Biology needs a makeover. We need a new vocabulary that everyone can understand. We need to be proud of the research that will have an impact on the public’s life. Most importantly, we need to be united in our goal. Developmental biology is an extremely broad term. We must not be eager to divide ourselves based on our research, our question or our model. Ultimately we are all trying to work out the mystery of how a single cell can make something as amazing as a plant or animal. Once we remember that, we can share the sex appeal and developmental biology can thrive. Maybe we can convince people that experts aren’t so bad after all.

The future of Developmental Biology – addressing biological complexity

Kane Toh Qin

Conrad Waddington proposed the metaphorical epigenetic landscape in the 1940s as a model for the unfolding of discrete cell fates. In the modern post-genomic era, the metaphor has experienced a resurgence in popularity. Tailored with the theory of dynamical systems, developmental biologists have used the conceptual apparatus to make quantitative predictions of differentiation dynamics. The appeal of the epigenetic landscape illustrates the importance of conceptual frameworks in developmental biology to highlight general principles of development; a notion that is especially pertinent in light of the overwhelming complexity of the ‘omics’ datasets today.

As sequencing technologies, time-lapse imaging techniques and genetic engineering methods continue to improve, we will have the technical tools to probe the epigenetic landscape. I believe that Developmental Biology in the future will provide increasingly coherent and precise explanatory accounts of phenomenological discontinuities that arise in different spatial and temporal scales of organismal development. For instance, how do fluctuations in the number of mRNA and proteins in a single cell allow for the coordination of cellular decisions over cell populations? How is the genotype-to-phenotype map implemented in an organism, and how do these properties influence its long-term evolutionary dynamics and vice versa?

To pave the way for these explanations, developmental biologists should further appreciate that knowledge of the component parts of biological systems alone will not beget knowledge of principles of development. As the complex systems biologist Kunihiko Kaneko argues, using an analogy from physics, without the existence of (macroscopic) thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, which connects microscopic behaviour to macroscopic thermodynamic quantities, would not have existed as a branch in physics. This will encourage a shift in perspective away from a reductionistic snapshot of biological components to a processual, dynamic framework of developmental mechanisms as coupled, interacting processes in complex systems. As the physicist Robert Laughlin puts it affectionately, life is the ‘granddaddy of emergent phenomena’ and emergent phenomena, as we know it, arise from a collection of interactions.

The complexity of living systems is such that further progress in Developmental Biology will inevitably require advances that derive from interdisciplinary dialogues between natural scientists. As such, developmental biologists will become more familiar with the tools and concepts involved in constructing quantitative explanations to complement their study of developmental mechanisms. For example, information theoretic measures like entropy are used today by some biologists to understand the process of stem cell differentiation at a single cell level.

With the accumulation of so much biological data, one can sympathize with the notion that the complexity of biological development eludes further human understanding—a position that spurred the embryologist, Hans Driesch to embrace vitalism. But we should be optimistic about the future: organismal development can be understood mechanistically, by first extracting its most important features and then analysing the patterns that emerge with the interdisciplinary tools and conceptual frameworks at our disposal. The principal task of developmental biologists then is to continue directing attention to the Biology and working out the crucial biological features for investigation.

The experiment/paper in Developmental Biology that most inspired you

Emilio Mendez

My history is funny I think. When I was a kid, I remember asking my father about why elephants were so big? Why mice so small? Why our Pomeranian dog was small? Meanwhile, our neighbour had a big German Shepherd. My father was intrigued by my questions and decided to bring a complete juvenile encyclopaedia and tried to find the answers I was looking for inside it.

Those questions usually disappear quickly with traditional education, puberty, football and love. My father past away when I was sixteen years old, however, he left me many teachings about life, he always told me two things, first, try to understand what you cannot explain, usually its worth. Second, what a man can build, another one also can.

When I had to choose my path after high school, I decided to study Biochemistry, because I like it a lot biology and chemistry. However I was not familiarised with the work of a scientist, for me it was more like “I like that, and I do not like mathematics”, however, I have never been so wrong. Soon I got in touch with that other science, and my mind was amazed at the fact that they are interconnected in such a beautiful way that it is childish to think they walk separated ways in build our world.

When I was finishing my career, I decided to take a course called “Genetic Control of Development”, totally unaware of what it was about, but what I found was love at first sight. Suddenly all my questions, my early questions came to my mind, especially when I saw the paper of Ross G. Harrison 1924, he transplanted limb buds of two different species of salamanders, with the idea of study which factors or signals affect the proportions of tissues. As the title of the paper, unexpectedly, both limb buds developed to its average size (donor size). That shocking difference was all I was looking for; suddenly I realise my question about the size of an individual it has no answer yet, however many factors have been described since Harrison (and Twitty 1931).

Those papers are essential for me because they summarise the beauty of Developmental Biology, simple question with simple experiments and a fantastic result, which open new roads to explore how the life has developed in our world. Later on, during my PhD studies, I meet the magnificent book “On Growth and Form”, it is the perfect crystal of all the sciences working together to build a life. I believe that if every boy and girl could see this book, many of them will never lose their curiosity about our world.

These are some of the elements that guide me to developmental biology, they drive me back to my childhood, like an old forgotten melody that came up out of nowhere. Just to realise how brave my father was.

I think he was telling me to study what a man cannot build yet, the life.

The future of Developmental Biology

Amanda BergAs the human species expands its curiosity and desire to explore the unknown, the concept of inhabiting other planets does not seem too distant. As humans, we are naturally curious and have always had the desire to explore our surroundings. Colonisation of Mars, or even more distant planets, will rely heavily on the successful reproduction and growth of the human species. Currently, scientists are investigating the physiological role that gravity and space travel can play on our bodies, but for successful fertilisation and growth of foetuses in space, we will also need to start thinking about the effect of space flight and gravity on a developing embryo.

Xenopus laevis embryos have previously been sent to space and as a result they grew into abnormally developed larvae. They had longer tails, combined with smaller heads and bodies than the Earth-grounded comparisons. Their notochords were deformed, with resulting abnormal curvature of the spine, causing them to swim in backwards somersaults (Snetkova et al., 1995). It is possible that these defects are due to abnormal dorsal-ventral axis specification which is determined through cortical rotation, and is thought to rely on gravity.
Another experiment was also proposed to attempt to grow chicken embryos in space, but due to the complicated experimental design and short time-scale given to the project, it never went ahead (NASA, 1977).

More recently, 2-cell mouse embryos were sent into space, which went on to develop into healthy blastocysts (Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2016). This exciting result means human embryos may also be able to develop in space. It would be exciting to investigate whether these blastocysts could be implanted into female mice, and whether they can form healthy offspring.

We will also need to consider whether normal reproduction can occur in space. Fertilisation had occurred on earth for all of these experiments, and the animals were also not grown to full term. We will also need to consider the different gravitational fields found on other planets; how would an embryo look if it was conceived and fully developed on the International Space Station, where gravity is almost minimal? What about on Mars, where the gravity is weaker than on Earth?

It is inevitable that humans will attempt to colonise other planets, and to do so we must investigate the possibility of reproduction and development of embryos in space. We can only hope that healthy foetuses can develop, and that the growth of the human species is not inhibited by its own developmental biology.

References:

Chinese Academy of Sciences (2016) “Chinese scientists develop mammal embryos in space for first time”, accessed 01.03.2018 [LINK]

NASA (1977) “SP-401 Skylab, Classroom in Space. Chapter 5: Embryo Development in Space”, accessed 01.02.2018 [LINK]

Snetkova, E. et al. (1995) ‘Effects of space flight on Xenopus laevis larval development’, Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A, 273(1), 21-32

What has developmental biology contributed to society?

Sandra G Gonzalez Malagon

“How are we formed?” My 6-year old nephew asked me with innocent wisdom. It’s been 17 years since and I still do not have a simple answer for him. The observation of natural life and the attempts to explain the world around us has fascinated human beings throughout our existence. Even Ancient Greeks considered fundamental questions about embryogenesis and inheritance. Developmental Biology (DB) covers all of these related questions: How do different organisms develop? What controls the patterning of different species? What are the subtle differences that lead to individual characteristics? What happens if the synchrony is disturbed? How does the environment influence an organism’s development?

Our Society today has a better understanding on how a person’s life develops from the womb. New parents can not only envision the stages of development of their unborn baby, but they also are aware of the importance of reproductive age, a healthy lifestyle and the risks of alcohol, cigarettes, medications and environment on their child’s development. They can be offered in utero diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities or assessment of embryos prior to implantation can be a choice for parents who present high risks of passing a disease to their child. This information has made a tremendous impact not just for families, but also potentially eradicating disease and addressing global health problems.

DB studies identified the factors required for a cell to remain pluripotent -undifferentiated state- and the factors to induce these cells into specific cell types, (muscle, neurons, etc.) These findings provided the basis for the complicated protocols used to culture them in vitro. The surprising ability of these pluripotent cells to self-organise ex vivo and differentiate into a functional “organoid” (a small replication of a functional organ) has given the field of translational and basic research an outstanding advantage. These organoids can be cultured from human cells and are a great tool to model human diseases and to find personalised treatments. Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine are the two emerging fields in Biology that have reshaped the way we think of development and disease. Although not yet mature, potential treatments for diabetes, neuronal regeneration, or gut repair -just to mention a few- are in the list of possible successful treatments, that up to date, have not been found.

From understanding how we develop to finding disease treatments, how other organisms develop to how the environment influences these processes and evolution, DB will continue to be the “stem cell of biology disciplines”, as Professor Scott Gilbert described in his recent essay on this topic. DB has the potential to give rise to many disciplines in biology, as it has been doing for a long time. As for my nephew, I hope that the innate developmental biologist that lives in every kid continues to be curious and astonished about the natural world that surrounds us. Only this will help preserve our planet and the species that live in it.

The Duty of Developmental Biologists

Massimo Ganassi

“So, which illness are you trying to make the cure for?” -he asked me mumbling- “Well, we are now studying how muscle is formed during embryonic development and this may be helpful to understand what goes awry in muscle diseases and therefore suggest a cure”. Even more confused he looked at me and said: “ mmm… but I guess it would be better, and quicker, to study how to cure the disease directly rather than how something is working when is working right, isn’t it?”. I admit, this always sounds a very honest, genuine and reasonable suggestion from a “non-science” person. Indeed, at this point I usually avoid adding confusion saying that I do research on embryonic fish muscle development.Similar conversations happen frequently to me, whenever I try to explain what my job is and how scientists spend their hours working.

For everyone, from kids to older people, it is easy to appreciate the efforts of a baker, a plumber or a bus driver simply because they produce usage for everyone. In contrast, the importance of scientific research does not reach the many and Developmental Biology is still thought to be a mere scientific and academic discipline whose results are far away from everyday life needs. Sadly, this just reflects how far the “normal” and “scientific” worlds are still apart, and it is partly our fault.

From the pioneer work of D’Arcy Thompson¹, through the golden decades of developmental biology, to the most recent “omics” era an incredible amount of knowledge has been reached and fruitfully contributed to our wellness. As insiders we all know that developmental biology deeply enhanced the understanding of a multiplicity of biological processes from fertilisation of egg cells to the healing of wounds, nevertheless contributing to the treatment of human conditions such as infertility, cancer or genetic diseases. Moreover, several excellent works have highlighted the central role of Developmental Biology in an attempt to attract and engage the lay public into scientific research discoveries^2,3,4,5.

As a matter of fact, nowadays, communicating science is even more important than making scientific discoveries. This is also reflected by the importance given to public outreach events and their primary role even in grant proposal applications. We must convince people that basic research is worth their consideration and money donation. Recently, to help scientists in public outreach, many platforms have become available to spread science, from the more specialist web-forum The Node to the more common social media⁶.

We do have the responsibility and duty to translate the importance of our research by strengthening our communicative potential. This means explaining to people why animal models such as mouse, zebrafish, frog and fruitfly are so important in our research and how developmental biology has contributed to everyday life, from the most recent medicine advance to the latest agriculture technique. This has to be the main goal of every scientist. We do make daily efforts to achieve our research aims and we must make our goals and results understandable by everyone.

References

[1] Thompson D’AW. On Growth and Form. (1917) Cambridge University Press.

[2] Prokop A. What is developmental biology and why is it important. (2018) https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/developmental-biology-important/41386/

[3] Edge L. What Is the Future of Developmental Biology? (2017) Cell 170:6 -7, doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2017.06.019

[4] St Johnston D. The Renaissance of Developmental Biology. (2015) PLoS Biol 13(5): e1002149. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002149

[5] Pourquié O. Development: looking to the future. (2012) Development 139: 1893-1894; doi: 10.1242/dev.082685

[6] Vicente C., Maartens A., Brown K. The Node and beyond-using social media in cell and developmental biology. (2017) Semin Cell Dev Biol. 70:90-97. doi: 10.1016/j.semcdb.2017.05.009.