Antoine Zalc, Shaping Life 2, Online Conference, 7-9 April 2021

Shaping Life 2

→ Boarding Pass

Postdoc, Mondor Institut for Biomedical Research (IMRB), Créteil

I really enjoyed the concluding keynote lecture from Cassandra Extavour. Her smart and discrete use of sci-fi references directly grabbed my attention.

At the opposite of hypothesis driven projects, Cassandra Extavour generates quantitative data of very high quality to study nuclei axial elongation in insect embryos. Strictly following the data, she tries to understand the rules generating such diversity in sizes and shapes during insect embryo development. She then produces computer simulations to test whether their careful analysis captures all the parameters governing the development of insect eggs and embryos.  Finally, going back to the embryo, she tests how changes in a given parameter affects development in real life and how her computational models hold up.

Her research topics are really far from mine, nevertheless I really appreciated the clarity and quality of her presentation. While I’m mostly interested in transcriptomics and epigenetics regulation controlling embryo development, this talk, and others opened up potential novel avenues to explore for my future research.

Thank you very much for this virtual travel grant! It’s great to be able to reconnect with the French community and meet old friends and new ones!

→ Antoine presented a short talk entitled: “Murine cranial neural crest precursors reawaken pluripotency programs”