Julien Leclercq, Shaping Life 2, Online Conference, 7-9 April 2021

29 April 2021
By aude maugarny-cales
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Shaping Life 2
→ Boarding Pass

PhD student, Institut des Neurosciences Paris-Saclay

I attended to the Shaping Life 2 conference on April 2021 organized by the SFBD. Due to the pandemic it was held fully online. Thanks to the organizing committee everything went well. The conference was great with a lot of lots of talks covering various aspect of developmental biology from mechanics to EVO-DEVO. The intersessions and poster sessions were held on Gather.Town, a virtual space that allowed us to interact with other participants in a way close to a “real” in-person meeting.
One of the most interesting talk to me was the talk of Andrea Pauli entitle “Small proteins with big roles – From cell migration to species-specific fertilization” and a related talk of Jennifer Zanet on the role of microproteins on leg development in drosophila. I did not know of this class of proteins (<100aa) and was amazed by their role during development. This is very interesting because there are a lot of putative microproteins and they can regulate diverse process like differentiation, morphogenesis and even the specie-specific fertilization! I also like very much the talk of Thibaut Brunet on “Choanoflagellates and the origin of animal morphogenesis”. I was amazed by the way unicellular organisms can interact together and create organized structures.
During the poster session, I could interact with Arthur Boutillon, a PhD student from the lab of Nicolas David. I am working on gastrulation and his work on mesodermal cell migration during zebrafish gastrulation is of particular interest to me. I was particularly interested to see that the cues allowing the anterior migration of the cells come in fact from more posterior cells.
Overall this meeting allow me to expand my knowledge on several topics related to developmental biology as well as discovering new fields I was not aware of. I am grateful to the SFBD board for organizing the conference and allowing me to present my poster.

→ Julien presented a poster entitled: “Maternal control of developmental evolution in blind cavefish”