Florence Giger, Shaping Life 2, Online Conference, 7-9 April 2021

Shaping Life 2

→ Boarding Pass

Postdoc, MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, King’s College, London

I am grateful to the SFBD for organising such a great meeting despite the current situation and giving me the opportunity to present my work by granting me a boarding pass. Gather town interactions worked well and allowed me to catch up with previous colleagues, which is crucial to me as I have been in the UK for 4 years. For sure it would have been even nicer to share a glass with old and new friends in Cassis; we will enjoy it the better when travel and in person conferences will resume. Poster session may even have been better than in real life, as shouting to cover other people presenting nearby was not necessary. I had plenty of feedback, which enabled me to identify needed experiments and prioritise my next steps.

Seminars were diverse and high quality. I really enjoyed discovering the world of choanoflagellates and their morphogenetic response to the environment with Thibaut Brunet. I was fascinated by Andrea Pauli’s fertilisation talk describing previously unannotated bouncer peptide. This evolutionary-divergent small protein, expressed exclusively in the egg in fish, would be the answer to two main challenges of sperm-egg fusion: efficiency and species-specificity. Bouncer’s mammalian homolog is expressed exclusively in the sperm in vertebrates with internal fertilisation, raising the possibility that it could have a conserved role in mammalian fertilisation.

Shaping Life 2 conference ended with a very inspiring keenote lecture in which we travelled with Cassandra Extavour through decades of observations of insect eggs, combined with high-resolution tracking of cell nuclei, to uncover relationships between egg and embryo size and shape.

→ Florence presented a poster entitled: “Future eyes are the master orchestrators of early anterior brain morphogenesis”