Meeting of the Society of Biochem and MolBio + future meetings + small rant

I recently attended one of the largest scientific meetings in the country, the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. It was held at “Gran Hotel Termas de Chillán”, a 5-star hotel right in the middle of the mountain. We had access to hot springs and pools and we were surrounded by the most beautiful scenery.

With two friends, outside the hotel

The meeting was fascinating, although a little too “biochem-oriented” for my taste (rather than molbio-oriented). I got to meet Rob Martienssen, a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory working on plant epigenetics, with whom I shared a good number of wine bottles over dinner on various nights and many of what he referred to as “Chile Libre” (you know Cuba Libre right? Rum + Coke. Rob defined Chile Libre as Pisco + Coke). Meeting Rob (who invited me to visit his lab when I fly to the US, see below) was definitely one of the meeting highlights for me.

Rob Martienssen

The meeting was divided in a number of different Symposiums, with topics ranging from Virology, Plant Biochemistry and Biomedicine, to Cell Signalling and Bioinformatics, just to name a few.

A particularly interesting Symposium was the one on Plant Small RNAs, in which Rob, along with Scott Poethig and our very own Rodrigo Gutierrez, discussed a variety of small RNA-regulated processes in plants.

Also, we got to listen to David Holmes talk about the “challenges and opportunities for life at pH:1”, which focused on comparative genomics, and to Richard Garrat discuss the classification of protein domain folds (there's actually a protein chart with a number of different folds, resembling a periodic table).

Giancarlo de Ferrari, presently at Univ. Andrés Bello, also gave a very interesting talk on the role of Wnt signalling pathway in neurological diseases and how his group is using data derived from GWAS to address this.

With my PI, outside the hotel

All in all, I had a great time, I got to show my work to others (and almost got the prize for Best Poster - I was among the 3 finalists-) and bonded with my labmates, which is always important. My idea is to now attend two other meetings in the near future: one in Europe, from which I’m still waiting to hear back, and the very popular Fungal Genetics meeting, which will take place in Asilomar, California on March 2011. I have to somehow raise money to attend these meetings, so maybe I should get a paper route (or 10,000 of them!).

On another note and to wrap this up, here’s a small rant: it doesn’t matter where you are, you’ll always run into people that will try to cram 40 slides into 10-min talks. Obviously, they are not able to finish in time and so, when the session chair tells them they are out of time, they’ll keep on talking and fly through ten slides filled with data. What’s wrong with those guys? Session chairs should have the power to smack them in the head and send them outside to “think of what they’ve done”.

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Meeting report: "The Architecture of Life"

A few weeks ago, the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) Barcelona held its first ever PhD student symposium and I had the pleasure of being part of its organizing committee, along with a few other graduate students. In this post I want to present part of the exciting science discussed there, but first I’d like to briefly highlight the importance of science communication in the life of a scientist

Science, for me, is not just sitting at the bench performing experiments and generating data. An important part of the life of a scientist is the actual communication of his research, not only to the rest of the scientific community, but also, and perhaps just as important, to the non-scientific population.

Regarding the former, I had the chance of getting firsthand experience in organizing a scientific meeting, something for which scientists rarely get any instruction during their careers. This was an exciting experience and I highly recommend it, despite all the hard work involved: in this case, the pros definitely outweighed the costs.

The concept behind this symposium was straightforward: let PhD students organize a meeting for other PhD students. We had to handle every detail, like coming up with the meeting’s theme, contacting scientists of different fields and putting together its website.

Since this was our first time being a part of such a project, we decided to give it a broad orientation, such that would encompass most of the fields studied in our institute. In the end, we booked 8 speakers with very different scientific backgrounds divided in 4 sessions: DNA and RNA, Proteins, Cells and Tissues/Organisms (as you can see, the categories cannot be broader).

We decided on “The Architecture of Life” for the meeting’s theme and so, we intended to start of from the basic building blocks and, throughout the meeting, work our way to whole organisms. I won´t go into much detail regarding the talks, but I do want to give you a brief idea of the wide array of interesting topics addressed.

Starting everything off was Gene Myers and Eric Miska.

As some of you may know, Gene Myers pioneered the BLAST algorithm (which most of us use on a daily basis), and during his talk he gave an overview of its inner workings. He then went on to discuss how he developed the shotgun sequencing strategy (which nowadays is pretty much standard) and he concluded his talk by presenting some of his current work regarding high-throughput image analysis software.

Eric Miska talked about non coding RNAs, with a particular focus in miRNA studies. He works on C elegans, and he showed some very interesting projects aimed at studying the complex biology of miRNAs in this organism. Notably, he showed that the repressive function of certain miRNAs can be stably inherited. If you are interested in this area I recommend you keep an eye on Eric’s work.

The second session focused on protein biology, and we had the opportunity to listen to this year´s Noble laureate Ada Yonath, as well as to the cutting edge science of Tanja Kortemme.

Ada´s talk focused on the ribosome, and she gave an extensive structural overview on how this amazing macromolecular machine works. Furthermore, she talked about how structural insights have led her group to hypothesize about the evolutionary history of the ribosome.

Tanja Kortemme´s talk focused on “protein engineering”. By protein engineering I mean that her group is actually designing and testing new interactions between proteins through a combination of computational structure predictions and old-school classic chemistry, which is mainly used for validation purposes. I think she gave a wonderful talk I consider her work to be very impressive.

The third session combined talks given by two scientists working in very different areas: Wolfgang Baumeister and Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz.

In his talk, Wolfgang discussed how the application of EM tomography can help elucidate very complex biological processes. For example, by applying the methodology developed in his lab, they can literally count the number of ribosomes present in a particular subcellular compartment (he showed some beautiful results of studies done in neuron synapses in culture). This can also be used to count other macromolecular complexes present in a particular subcellular location.

Next up was Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, who, in my opinion, gave the best talk in the symposium. Her lab is studying how the first cell-fate decisions are made in the mouse embryo and their question is quite straightforward: how do identical cells end up with such different phenotypes? In her talk, Magdalena summarized the major breakthroughs her lab has made in the last few years. For those who are more interested in the subject I recommend that you read her recent review in Nature Reviews Genetics (doi:10.1038/nrg2564).

The final session, centered on developmental biology, also had two great speakers: Darren Gilmour and Steve Cohen.

Darren´s work focuses on cell migration using zebrafish as a model. His group aims to understand the molecular and biophysical properties underlying the development of the zebrafish lateral line system, an attractive model system for studying cell migration during organogenesis. Interestingly (and I’m leaving out a lot of details), it appears that the leading cells have distinct signaling pathways activated (compared to the lagging ones), that when disturbed inhibit the movement of the entire group of cells.

The final talk was given by Steve Cohen, who is currently studying miRNAs in Drosophila. One of his most attractive projects involves knocking out every single miRNA from the Drosophila genome. Shall this area of research pique your interest, keep your eyes open for his upcoming work and also check out some of his already published research (for example, see PLoS One 2007;2(11):e1265)

That’s it for this brief overview of the symposium we organized, “The Architecture of Life”. This was a great experience and I sincerely hope these sorts of initiatives are imitated in other institutions worldwide.

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Another one from Cell Press: free symposia!

I've been increasingly liking Cell Press over the past few months, as it provides us with several tools that increase communication and make the science they publish, more amenable [See More on Science 2.0: Cell Press and a few of Cell Press' Snapshots we've posted here].

I've just learned about Cell Press LabLinks (and apparently it has been around since '06) [From Cell Press online]:

Cell Press LabLinks are FREE, one-day symposia organized by local scientists in conjunction with Cell Press editors. Each LabLinks features local and keynote speakers discussing a unified topic in order to foster interactions between colleagues working on related questions – colleagues across town, across the street or even across the hall.

The upcoming meeting, on "Molecular Pathogenesis of Leukemia and Lymphoma", will take place on Friday June 5, 2009, at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA.

The only thing you have to do is register, as seating is limited.

Also (and this is just awesome), by registering you enter into a contest (10 registrants will be randomly chosen) in which a one-year personal subscription to the Cell Press journal of your choice will be awarded!

Check the upcoming meetings here and see if there is a Lablink symposium coming your way.

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