9 March 2022

The 2022 Biophysical Society (BPS) meeting took place from 19-23 February and was the first in-person exhibition any of our journal teams have attended since the pandemic began. Familiar routines began to come back to us as we shipped our trusty booth to San Francisco and planned for flights. New procedures also became evident, such as the antigen tests required for international travel.

22 February 2022

It has been suggested that there is a link between pain and relapse into alcohol use disorder, two important areas of concern in the medical field. The mechanisms underlying this connection are not well understood, but the dynorphinergic system likely plays a key role. A DMM Travelling Fellowship recently supported a collaborative effort to investigate this in more detail.

14 February 2022

Oil production in the Arctic is on the rise, which in turn makes oil pollution an ever-increasing threat. Crude oil spills can have devastating repercussions for marine organisms, including cardiotoxicity. It is thought that polyaromatic hydrocarbons such as phenanthrene are responsible for causing this damage to the heart. However, previous research into their effects have rarely considered the whole organism and have largely been concerned with embryonic fishes.

2 February 2022

Every time we eat, from hurried snacks to three-course meals, our oesophagus gets to work and delivers the food from our mouths to our stomachs. We usually take this process for granted, but have you ever wondered how it happens so smoothly?

21 January 2022

In the 1990s, researchers performed the first large-scale genetic mutagenesis screens in zebrafish. They were led by Professor Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard in Tübingen, Germany, and Professor Wolfgang Driever in Boston, USA. This huge effort resulted in 37 research articles, which were published together in a special issue of Development. These articles described hundreds of different mutants with phenotypes that affected almost every tissue in the developing fish.

2 March 2022

Dr Mereena Ushakumary is a postdoctoral researcher studying late lung development in Dr Anne-Karina Perl’s laboratory at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. With in-person conferences returning after the disruption of the pandemic, she took the opportunity to attend her first Gordon Research Conference.

14 February 2022

Three of The Company of Biologists’ journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science, and Journal of Experimental Biology – offer Travelling Fellowships of up to £3,000 to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers wishing to make collaborative visits to other laboratories. Here, we explain what makes our Travelling Fellowships such a great opportunity.

10 February 2022

Here at The Company of Biologists, we are passionate about advocating for early-career researchers (ECRs) and improving their visibility. To support this, our three community sites – FocalPlane, the Node and preLights – have come together to organise an online panel event focussed on ways ECRs can promote themselves.

27 January 2022

For Dr Anne-Karina Perl, an associate professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, November 2021 was truly uplifting. Almost two years into the coronavirus pandemic, she was finally heading to an in-person meeting in the form of the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Lung Development, Injury and Repair. Even more significantly, this was a conference that she herself had coordinated, steering the meeting through the uncertainties of the pandemic with the help of Dr Daniel Tschumperlin, Dr Rory Morty, and Dr Xin Sun.

13 January 2022

This blog is written by Alastair Downie, Head of IT at The Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, who has been kind enough to share his thoughts on hybrid meetings.