João E. Carvalho, Porto, 7-10 November 2018

Joint Meeting of the Portuguese, Spanish and French Societies for Developmental Biology

FRM Post-Doc with Eric Röttinger, IRCAN, Nice

– article in English –

Thanks to a travel grant from the SFBD and ITMO-BCDE I had the opportunity to participate to the Joint Meeting of the Portuguese, Spanish and French Societies for Developmental Biology that took place in Porto from the 7-10 November 2018. During this meeting I had the chance to listen to great talks and discuss with outstanding developmental biologists.

Pedro Rifes’ presentation about human pluripotent stem cells and microfluidic culturing techniques and how to use it to study early regionalization of human neural tube was certainly amongst the most interesting talks. Also very interesting the talk of Covadonga Díaz-Díaz on how epiblast cells that express heterogeneous levels of Myc (low and high) communicate and define which of those will be selected and eliminated, in which Gap-junctions seem to play a fundamental role. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning the great talk given by Eloisa Herrera showing that Wnt/β-catenin signaling can work, not only via the canonical nuclearization of β-catenin, but also it has a clear direct function in the extracellular matrix.