Highlights from the ISSCR – 3
So, my postdoc and I sat at a “yuppie bar” called Time, half-listening to the live trio, half-commiserating over the latest article rejection, trying on and discarding various ideas for making this work more palatable to a given target audience. It’s not like there is a dearth of future directions.
Just to remind some of you readers out there that I’m just a scientist. Not a journalist. Even less a saleswoman.
The mixer was a bit prom-like, but sweet. Lots of people, so it wasn’t completely silly. We had a nice chat with a French researcher working in Hawaii about the French brain drain, got some perspective by acknowledging that it’s worse yet in Italy, and then took refuge in our respective rooms.
Meanwhile, today was a busy day. Unfortunately, I am leaving tomorrow afternoon, so am missing our own poster session. I went and intercepted a couple of interested people in front of it today, since it was put up this morning but needs not be attended in person until tomorrow.
I attended thirteen excellent oral presentations today (can that be right?!), at eleven of which I actually took notes, and countless posters, at which I struck up conversations at at least seven. So it’s a little unfair to pick out a couple to talk about. I’ll briefly discuss one speech and one poster.
Sally Temple presented lovely work about isolating adult human stem cells from the back of the eye, ostensibly from the pigmented retinal epithelium. This work seems to be as yet unpublished. Bravo for sharing it at the conference first! These cells in culture can first make what they are supposed to: pigmented retinal epithelium, with an appropriate architecture. Second, they can be induced by regimens developed for ES cells, to express a number of genes typical of different, non-physiological parts of the neural retina. Most interestingly to me, when the cells are detached from their substrate, they express all sorts of genes typical of neural crest cells. But altogether, these “stem” cells – or time- but not lineage-restricted progenitors – divide for up to 11 passages before dividing no more. They do not form teratomas upon injection into mice, though I don’t remember if it is because they can not or because the attempt was not made.
Sally kindly welcomed the cloud of interested people who wanted to ask her questions after the session, as we were all shooed out to make room for another session. I wondered if the initial population was not in fact heterogeneous – mostly retinal pigmented epithelium, but also seeded with some quiescent neural crest cells that reside in the vascular choroid plexus just behind that tissue. If the resuspension of the cells freed up these putative cells of neural crest origin to express their more unrestricted phenotypic possibilities. The idea was not dismissed outright. Nothing is more flattering than to have someone listen respectfully and with intelligence to your ideas. More, perhaps, later.
Agnes Arthur from Stan Gronthos’ group presented a poster entitled, “Adult human dental pulp stem cells exhibit neuroplastic activity in vitro and in vivo“. The work in the poster has been recently published and also recently submitted. Agnes was very forthcoming both with results and interpretations and with technical tips and tricks. These cells will elicit axons from the trigeminal nerve to deviate from their normal pathways and grow toward the graft, when injected into developing chick embryos. These stem cells, presumably of neural crest origin, express the chemokine CXCL12 (stromal-derived factor 1 or SDF-1), which attracts the CXCR4-expressing endogenous neurons. It would attract hematopoietic stem cells, too, incidentally. This is really quite cool in the context of the seeding of the bone marrow by neural crest stem cells during development, a poster of recently published work presented Wednesday afternoon by Narihito Nagoshi from Hideyuki Okano’s laboratory, that I missed and has since been taken down. It’s always like that, one misses out on presentations one would have really liked to have seen.
I may not write in tomorrow since I leave in the afternoon for home. It will have been intense but fruitful.
Posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 12:12 am Categorized as:development, general science, personal You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 14th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Hi,
I did walk past the poster about the menstrual fluid SCs. I’ve read a bit about them as well, and its still a bit obscure to me what they actually are, and why there seems to be more energy put into isolating and storing them than finding out how they work or what they could be good for.
I really like your summaries about the meeting. What did you think of Philly and the meeting in general? I enjoyed Toronto ‘06 a bit more . . .
Also, this is my first time seeing your blog. Its great to hear of people who can be human and scientist at the same time. I’m a big proponent of that myself.
Au revoir
June 15th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Goodness me, thirteen talks in one day? That’s dedication.
I’ve almost completely given up taking notes at seminars, conferences and the like – I just never remember I have them, and thus never look at them again. I’ll scribble things down if I’m pretty sure some of my colleagues will be interested though.
June 16th, 2008 at 2:35 am
Yay! Someone read this stuff while I was on the plane and then filling my interstitial spaces with as much coffee as I could…!
I’ll try to sum up my impressions of the conference in the next post.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Rwintle :
If one has a scanning photocopier (as we do have work) it’s a good idea to scan to pdf and stick your conference notes/slide hand outs and put them in a file directory like Conference_June2008. It’s great for referring back, particularly if you keep an index file, like a spreadsheet, of topics by date and line.
I tend to do this for courses, conferences etc so I can recycle the paper (which just fills the office anyway) and have it all reachable in a usable form.
June 16th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I would love a smart application that can actually read my handwritten notes and make them searchable by keyword. Seriously, though, I don’t mind typing to get to that point. I just need (and hope to acquire this summer) a laptop that is light enough and with sufficient battery autonomy to take the notes.
Okay, back to work. My PCR isn’t giving me the bands I want, so off to the fine art of tweaking.
June 16th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I’m ususally taking notes at talks but I have realised it is mainly to do with my memory skills… I remember if I use me hand and write it down – form somekind of memory around the words rather than just listening to the talk.
Afterwards? I store the notes in the back of the abstract book where I usually have folded the corners of the pages where the most interesting posters were.
It is fun to read your summaries!! Sounds like an interesting and fun conference. And good luck with resending the article!!! I’ll cross my fingers!