I asked program committee chair Ron McKay for the highlights I should look for over the next few days of the ISSCR. He tactfully declined to mention individuals. Instead he said was particularly proud of the diversity. “There’s no single agenda here,” he said, “no club.”

So, perhaps it’s not too surprising that no clear highlight has emerged yet. At tonight’s reception, I asked everyone I met to summarize his or her favorite talk, and though there have been only ten talks so far, no single one is emerging as most popular. Here’s a summary: (I’m borrowing phrases from people I spoke with.):

Marianne Bronner-Fraser from CalTech said that epigenetics, in particular histone methylation, seems to control the settings within the gene regulatory networks governing neural crest cell development and migration.

Rusty Gage from the Salk Institute said that adult brains may well be genetic mosaics. LINES elements seem to jump preferentially into neuronal genes in neural precursors. It’s not clear why this would be adaptive.

Elena Cattaneo from the University of Milan showed links between BDNF and the huntingtin protein.

Yukiko Gotoh of the University of Tokyo showed that Wnt and Polycomb proteins together function as a sort of time-keeper, so that the way that neural stem cells respond to external cues is regulated in time.

Azim Surani described multiple states of pluripotency in embryonic stem cells, embryonic germ cells, and epiblast cells. He described some of the complex machinery developing germ cells use as they prepare for totipotency (suppressing somatic programs, reactivating the X-chromosome and pluripotency genes).

Paolo Bianco of the Sapienza University of Rome said that mesenchymal stem cells are not all the same. Some express the muscle marker Pax7! Exploring these differences could help show how postnatal progenitors establish themselves in muscle and other tissues.

Elaine Fuchs of Rockefeller University described the exquisite players that balance resting and proliferation in the skin; Haifan Lin of Yale, how a whirl of RNA–RNA-protein interactions of varying stability) regulate gene translation, Nancy Wexler tooks us on her journey to identify the Huntington gene, Etienne Hirsch of INSERM described how, even as dopamine neurons in Parkinson’s models degenerate, other types of cells proliferate.