Nathan Hervieux, Porto, 7-10 November 2018

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

Post-doc with Benedicte Sanson, Physiology, development et Neuroscience dpt, U. Cambridge

I’m very happy to have been able to participate to the Joint Meeting of the Portuguese, Spanish and French Societies for Developmental Biology (also the 4th Meeting of the Portuguese Society for Developmental Biology) which took place in Porto, Portugal on 7 – 10 November 2018. I really enjoyed this relatively small meeting but with a large diversity of topics and model organisms, even if plants were under-represented with only one talk from Olivier Hamant (ENS Lyon).

The last session on morphogenesis/biomechanics and biophysics was particularly relevant for me. I particularly enjoyed the talk of Verena Ruprecht from the CRG in Barcelona, showing how embryos can ‘clean themselves’ using adaptative protrusion formation in specific tissue types that guarantee robustness against errors via rapid apoptotic cell clearance. In addition to a very nice scientific program, the organisation of the meeting was excellent, particularly with the meeting dinner organised in an amazing venue ‘La Casa da Música’.

This joint meeting was a brilliant idea and I really hope that this type of meeting will happen more often.