Posts

March 14, 2013

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3:28 PM | CiteAb: a search engine for antibodies

This week we’re launching CiteAb - a brand new antibody search engine suitable for Developmental Biologists working with model organisms, including C. elegans, Drosophila, Zebrafish, Xenopus and Chick, as well as mammals. We feature nearly 1 million antibodies, rated by citations. See http://citeab.com for more details. This is a new site so we would very [...]

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2:04 PM | Stem cells image competition: voting

Over the last few weeks, you’ve been submitting your images for the Node and Development’s stem cell cover competition. We received a large number of entries, and you’ve proved to us that stem cells - both in their natural environments and in a dish - can be just as beautiful as the embryos that normally [...]

March 13, 2013

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2:46 PM | Revive Postdoc Program – Permanent Call

The Revive Postdoc program offers up to 3 years fellowships to young scientists in stem cell research. A PERMANENT CALL for application is open, candidates must be first selected by a Revive host lab prior to apply to the program. The following Revive research labs are currently seeking for candidates to apply in 2013: · [...]

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1:36 PM | Young Group Leader Positions in Stem Cell Biology

The Institut Pasteur announces an international call for candidates wishing to establish independent research groups on its Paris, France campus. The recruitments are part of the Revive Laboratory of Excellence (LabEx) programme, recently awarded to the Institut Pasteur on “Stem Cells and Regenerative Biology and Medicine”. Candidates will be integrated into the cutting edge interdisciplinary [...]

March 12, 2013

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11:23 PM | Abstract Submission for 8th European Zebrafish Meeting is approaching

The 8th European Zebrafish Meeting, 9-13 July, Barcelona welcomes proposals from all areas of zebrafish research for consideration for oral and poster presentation. This meeting will gather together researchers from all over the world to discuss the recent discoveries in the zebrafish field. All communications will be presented either as oral or poster presentations. Don´t [...]

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12:37 PM | In Development this week (Vol. 140, Issue 7)

Here are the highlights from the current issue of Development: Mammary gland RankL-ed into making milk Extensive remodelling of the mammary gland during pregnancy generates milk-producing lobuloalveolar structures. During remodelling, multipotent stem cells proliferate and differentiate into lineage-committed progenitor cells, which subsequently differentiate into mature epithelial cell types. It has been proposed that progesterone [...]

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9:54 AM | PhD programLaunching

WELCOME to the INFORM PhD Program! The INFORM program (INformation Flow and ORganization at the Membrane) sets up an interdisciplinary consortium at the site of Scientific Park of Luminy in Marseilles, gathering 12 laboratories in Biology, Mathematics and Physics. The objective is to quantitatively understand the biochemical and mechanical basis of cell signaling at different [...]

March 11, 2013

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8:16 PM | The Post-Doctoral Treadmill

Like most things in life, research requires funding. This becomes increasingly apparent as researchers progress through their career. At some point, everyone has to jump on the funding treadmill. For many researchers, the first experience of a grant application process may be applying for postgraduate funding for their masters/PhD. While I never pursued this option [...]

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1:40 PM | Los Defectos de Mitocondrias en el Autismo

Las mitocondrias son pequenos organelos dentro de las celulas que sirven para estabilizar los niveles de calcio y juegan un papel importante en la mediación de un tipo de muerte [...]

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12:38 PM | Autism Research: Distinguishing the good from the bad

Neuropathology is the subspecialty of pathology that studies biopsies or autopsy tissue from the nervous system. The tissue examined includes the central and peripheral nervous system, skeletal muscle and occasionally [...]

March 09, 2013

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6:59 PM | Becoming a confident scientific speaker

Like needles in a haystack, interesting speakers that bring charisma and rock n’ roll to their talks are hard to come by. No matter what the research interests of the audience, these speakers hypnotize the audience with their funny analogies and the confidence in their data. Leaving the audience inspired to run back to the [...]

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1:17 AM | MAMMAL MARCH MADNESS!

In honor of the NCAA College Basketball March Madness Championship Tournament, Mammals Suck is featuring *simulated* head to head combat competition among mammals. I'll be honest, this is a blatantly swiped concept from Buzzfeed except their competition is about "cuteness". As we in the Comparative Lactation Lab were filling out our Buzzfeed animal brackets we found ourselves asking "what about <enter numerous awesome mammals here>?!?!?" so we ditched theirs and made our own vastly […]

March 08, 2013

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7:42 PM | A website for PostDocs and PhDs

After a life in science, some of those years getting paid, some of those years not, I decided to set up a website to help PhDs and PostDocs with decisions on what to do next with short shorties of people that have or are going through similar experiences. I also hope to help share a [...]

March 07, 2013

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2:22 PM | Stripes and Stem Cells

You didn’t stop developing once you were born (or hatched). Our infant selves barely resemble ourselves as adults, thankfully, and stem cells play an important role in this continued development. A recent paper describes the identification of a stem cell niche that generates the melanophores that are responsible for the color patterning in adult zebrafish. [...]

Dooley, C., Mongera, A., Walderich, B. & Nusslein-Volhard, C. (2013). On the embryonic origin of adult melanophores: the role of ErbB and Kit signalling in establishing melanophore stem cells in zebrafish, Development, 140 (5) 1003-1013. DOI: 10.1242/dev.087007

Citation

March 06, 2013

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3:38 PM | Regenerative Medicine: From Biology to Therapy: 30 October-1 November 2013

Regenerative Medicine: From Biology to Therapy 30 October-1 November 2013 Few topics in contemporary medicine have attracted more attention than stem cells and their potential for enabling the discovery of new regenerative therapies. The aim of this new Wellcome Trust Scientific Conference is to understand the biology that underpins the success or failure of regeneration, [...]

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11:40 AM | Autism: Banking on the future of our children

Everybody agrees that in order to find the cause(s) of autism, we have to focus our investigation on the brain. Only by looking directly at the brain can we achieve [...]

March 04, 2013

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4:39 PM | EMBO Workshop: Morphogen Gradients

We are pleased to announce that an EMBO Workshop on Morphogen Gradients will be held in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, UK from 26 – 29th June 2013. Registration is now open: http://events.embo.org/13-morphogen/ The goal of this workshop is to bring together biologists, physicists and imaging specialists to discuss how morphogen gradients are generated and interpreted. [...]

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2:44 PM | Harvard Thinks Big: "Why Mammals Suck"

On January 31, 2013 I was invited to give a mini-talk to Harvard […]

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11:38 AM | Mitochondrial Disorders and Autism

Mitochondria are minute intracellular organelles that serve to stabilize intracellular levels of calcium and play a prominent role in mediating a certain type of cell-death, the latter called apoptosis. However, [...]

March 03, 2013

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9:47 PM | Crocodile heads teach us a cracking lesson

I recently came across a study by Milinkovitch and colleagues on the development of crocodile head scales. I think it highlights how nature sometimes chooses unusual ways to approach development, so I thought I would share a short summary here! Scales, feathers and hairs are evolutionary adaptations to terrestrial life, fulfilling functions such [...]

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1:45 PM | The Squeeze Machine

The squeeze machine is known by many names, e.g., hug machine or hug box. I prefer calling it the squeeze machine to prevent confusion whenever I ask one of our [...]

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1:21 AM | Making sense of Wnt signaling

Did it ever occur to you that to enjoy music from Antonio Vivaldi to Lil Wayne, we use only about 22,000 sensory hair cells in our ears? Because hair cells are mechanosensors translating sounds to neural impulses, their irreversible degeneration causes hearing loss. Unlike amphibians and birds, we as mammals cannot spontaneously regenerate hair cells [...]

March 01, 2013

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11:40 AM | Sensory Problems in Autism

Throughout most of the history of autism as recorded within the medical literature, sensory problems have been paid very little attention. These were not unknown phenomena, both Kanner ad Asperger [...]

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11:30 AM | El Uso de Modelos de Animales en el Autismo

Hace par de años atrás, mientras participaba en una reunión (IMFAR) sobre el autismo asistí a una conferencia sobre el uso de animales como modelos de enfermedades humanas. La profesora, [...]

February 28, 2013

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4:34 PM | Cosy Science London

The Company of Biologists is sponsoring the next Cosy Science Meeting. “Jerky or Smooth: The Evolution of Cancer!”, a talk by David Pellman, will be held on March 13th at 7pm at The Citie of Yorke pub, London. There will be plenty of time for discussion, and nibbles and free drinks will be provided for [...]

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1:38 PM | This month on the Node: February 2013

It was a short month, but a momentous one in the life of the Node: Eva, who set up the site and ran it for the last almost three years, has said goodbye and moved on to new challenges. We’ll need your help to keep things going until her replacement arrives, so please keep posting, [...]

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1:09 PM | Dolores abdominales y migrañas en el autismo

Hace unos 17 años, cuando adquirí un interés personal en el autismo, el vínculo con síntomas abdominales se mencionaba en la literatura, pero era fácilmente descartado como coincidental. A lo [...]

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11:41 AM | Key Players in Autism: the Corpus Callosum

The corpus callosum is a bundle of neural fibers that connects both cerebral hemispheres. It is the largest white matter structure of the brain. Signs and symptoms of a corpus [...]

February 27, 2013

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5:13 AM | In Development this week (Vol. 140, Issue 6)

Here are the highlights from the current issue of Development: Cofilin and Vangl2 kick start planar cell polarity The planar cell polarity (PCP) pathway orients cells within the plane of an epithelium during development. Experiments in Drosophila indicate that the core PCP proteins move to the apical cell membrane during the initiation of PCP [...]

February 26, 2013

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5:59 PM | A Perspective on Psychological Theories of Autism

Clinicians have proposed different psychological theories to explain mental illness from the perspective of the mind. Some of them are imaginative explanations of facts that have not or can’t be [...]