Julien Leclercq, San Antonio, Texas, 28th February to 4th March 2022

I attended to the 7th Astyanax International Meeting in San Antonio Texas on March 2022. It  was my first in-person scientific event since the beginning of the pandemic and I enjoyed it particularly. I received a travel fellowship from the SFBD that helped me to participate to this meeting in person and present my work to the entire Astyanax community. This meeting gather the whole cavefish community thus a wide variety of domain are represented from metabolism to genomics to developmental biology and behavior. It was a good way to keep up to date with the most recent work with our model Astyanax mexicanus.

Interestingly one of the keynote speaker was Marianne Bronner, a developmental biologist unrelated to the Astyanax field. She gave a very interesting talk on neural crest cell and summarized the work of her lab on the evolution of neural crest cell population through vertebrate development (from lamprey to chicken). They identified a specific neural crest cell population (the vagal neural crest) responsible for the development of the enteric nervous system in amniotes. Among the many talks on cavefish I was more interested in those about development and evolution: I liked particularly the talk of Bill Jeffery on the change/loss of asymmetry of the visceral endoderm due to change of signaling in early development in cavefish (shh and foxj1a). I also like very much the talks on the evolution of hematopoiesis in cavefish with respect to the hypoxic condition of cave environment and the one of Joshua Gross on cranial bone formation and disorder in cavefish.

All in all it was a very enjoyable in-person meeting. I thank the SFBD for its support.