ASHG 2008 Kicks off

Last night the American Society of Human Genetics meeting started in Philadelphia and kicked off with a crowded mixer featuring classic Philly fare (hoagies and pretzels). I asked Aravinda Chakravarti what he thought the major themes of the meeting would be. He said he was glad to report that the field has moved slightly away from data to new ideas. New ideas including better understanding of the genetic structure of disease and the characterization and understanding of the meaning of structure in the genome, including copy number variations (a term that appears in the abstract book more than 200 times). That’s not to say that data have taken a back seat.  Read more

A chilling end to SDB 2008

Harry Eastlack looked like any other baby when he was born in Philadelphia in 1933, save for an inward-turned big toe, but at age ten, he developed a swelling and stiffness in his neck and back. The group of Philadelphia doctors that treated Harry would soon discover that the soft tissues of his body including muscles and cartilage were slowly, painfully transforming into bone, twisting and fusing the young man’s body until his death at age 40. His plight is known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), and it’s caused by an autosomal dominant mutation, usually arising de novo in 2 out of every million people. In the last talk at the 2008 Society for Developmental Biology meeting in Philadelphia, Eileen Shore from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine talked about her work from bedside to bench with children with FOP.  Read more

Testes all over at SDB 2008

I once had an English teacher who gave copious quizzes. Once, when someone complained about the work, he replied, “If you think my quizzes are bad you should see my testes.” It was an all-boys Catholic school, which explains how he could get away wish such crude sentiments. Nevertheless, I saw a talk about an organism that would put him and his abundant quizzes to the shame he deserves. The planarian, a flat, freshwater dwelling worm with comical eyespots and a superlative reputation for regeneration has another surprise under its belt. In addition to two ovaries just south of its tiny brain, the sexual form of some planarians has dozens of testes spread throughout its body.  Read more

Turtle power at SDB 2008

Turtle power at SDB 2008

At last night’s poster session I met Scott Gilbert of Swarthmore College and editor of a definitive text on Developmental Biology. He told me that before his last invited talk, at a symposium honouring the retirement of his former mentor, most in attendance wondered what turtleshell was all about. The scientists, figuring the title of his talk referred to some wacky Drosophila gene name, were surprised to find that Gilbert actually works on turtle shell development. Here he is with colleague Judith Cebra-Thomas at last evening’s poster session.  Read more

Before the rain at SDB 2008

Just before a violent downpour at Philadelphia’s UPenn campus, I got to chat with Society for Developmental Biology president Eric Wieschaus of Princeton University. (An aside: His quirky sense of humour set a nice tone at the opening symposium last night. When the powerpoint presentation he was working off of broke down, he admitted “My lab doesn’t let me get too close to machines.” Later clarifying: “I’m allowed near the microscopes, just not the ones with moving parts.”). He told me he didn’t quite have the clarity of thought to offer me any overarching trends in development in general or at the meeting in particular.  Read more

At SDB 2008: the same, but different

Most have abandoned Haeckel’s old chestnut that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, but when two organisms actually appear to have identical embryonic development, how close are the genetic programs that underlie each. In a wide ranging symposium on evolutionary genetics at the Society for Developmental Biology 67th annual meeting, Itai Yanai from Craig Hunter’s lab at Harvard looked at two nematode worms that are practically indistinguishable, the lab workhorse Caenorhabditis elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae from which it diverged some 80 to 100 million years ago. Evolutionarily, that puts them about as distant as humans and mice, but morphologically they’re practically indistinguishable. So, what can Yanai say about how these organisms use those different genes during what he calls the “200 most exciting minutes in the life of the worm”?  Read more

At Society of Developmental Biology 2008: “What the heck is a YFome?”

The opening symposium for the 67th annual Society of Developmental Biology meeting was held in the Irvine Hall on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. The cavernous auditorium is quite ornate with a massive pipe organ lining the front wall and arresting décor and proportions. Still more arresting was a word several slides into a talk on development and genomics by Joseph Ecker of The Salk Institue. He presented a list of ‘ome words like Proteome (cataloguing proteins), Promoterome (developing lists of DNA promoters), Phenome (cataloguing of phenotypes), Orfeome (catalogue of open reading frames), and more. But several in the hall were mumbling “What the heck is a YFome?” Before moving on to the next slide, Ecker shed some light on the mystery. Since someone invariably accuses him of missing some area of study he said, he added “Your Favourite ‘Ome.”  … Read more

ISSCR 2008: It’s “Shinyamania”

I cornered Harvard’s George Daley shortly after this afternoon’s opening symposium at the International Society for Stem Cell Research meeting in Philadelphia, and asked him for some stats and trends at the meeting. He’s the current president of ISSCR. There are 24,000 2,400 pre-registered attendees, he told me. That’s only 24 2.4 times the size of the last meeting I attended. As for trends: “There’s certainly a bit of Shinya-mania,” Daley said. He was referring to the focus on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), adult human cells reprogrammed to a stem cell-like state thanks to a couple of transcription factors by a Japanese group led by Shinya Yamanaka.  Read more

ISSCR 2008: Making Beta Cells (and cutting out the middleman)

Harvard’s Doug Melton, in a plenary talk this afternoon to open the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) meeting in Philadelphia, actually didn’t talk about stem cells at all. Rather he discussed new results showing direct differentiation of pancreatic tissue into the elusive and important Beta cells, skipping stem cells altogether.  Read more