EMBO conference - day four

Final thoughts on the EMBO meeting, from both our reporters!

Name: Uli Rockenbauch

Location: Vienna, Austria.

Date: 13th September 2011

Event: The EMBO meeting.

Back at university, I never really got the hang of neurosciences. I think I now know why: It was never about the sensory or behavioural side of it. Such a fascinating field!

I scrambled into the morning session of the fourth and final day of The EMBO Meeting, sleepy and grumpy. What was to follow was a scientific wake-up call by topics I had never really come to appreciate: Nobel laureate Richard Axel talked about the representation of olfactory information in the brain, followed by other well-renowned speakers like Cori Bargmann and Florian Engert. I guess if you can step up on a stage and talk about your science in shorts and a muscle-shirt (while everyone else is trying to look smart and formal, for once), then you are probably good at what you do. And indeed, the attractiveness of Florian Engert's experiments on motor learning in zebrafish was clear, for three reasons. #1: Everyone in the audience easily understood the significance of his research. #2: The findings instantly opened up new questions, which is what Gottfried Schatz likes to call 'the creation of new ignorance' in his famous talks, i.e. the realisation that there's questions you simply had never thought about before, but which now pop up immediately. At one point Barry Dickson asked: "So what if you switch around the fish's left-right motion control?" - the very same question I had in mind that moment.

Reason #3: With this experimental set-up one can now address questions that were previously inaccessible. In the presented work, Engert's group gave the animals an altered perception of their own movement, but because they are placed in a virtual visual reality one can do almost anything now: Making predators, other zebrafish or obstacles appear, clouding the fish's vision, retarding the vision, testing spacial memory, etc. And for all these processes it is now (or will soon be) possible to look at brain activity in real-time, and at single-cell level. I was highly impressed.

Finally, Edvard Moser gave the audience fascinating insights into the role of grid cells in spatial orientation. I think the discovery of grid cells is actually a good example which says a lot about the field of brain research: Here we are still at a stage where entirely fundamental discoveries are made, comparable to seeing the first receptor being phosphorylated by a tyrosine kinase, or realising that small vesicles transport cargo through a cell. This is way before the stage of "filling the remaining gaps" or "putting things together for the holistic picture", which is currently happening in other disciplines.

Speaking of which... The afternoon session on endocytosis featured two talks which I would like to put into contrast: First, Marino Zerial gave a talk on "Systems analysis of endocytosis". It made me wonder: Why is everyone so hyped about about systems biology? For example, three years ago Switzerland launched its currently largest research initiative, SystemsX, with a total public budget of a dazzling 100 Million Francs. The idea of seeing science from a bird's eye view is of course good and not new, and now the computing power has become available to integrate all available data to predict the complex behaviour of biological systems. But the question is: Do we really learn so much, at this stage?

Marino Zerial gave a grand introduction to his talk, promising to span the entire range of magnitudes from individual molecules to organelles, cells, tissues and entire organs. If you now think that this is a bit too much for a half-hour talk, I agree with you. Putting a limited number individually studied factors together for a 'systems view' can lead to fascinating and meaningful results - but it seems obvious that this requires sufficient knowledge of all the components involved, and their individual roles in the cell.

That we are indeed far from knowing even the identity of all relevant factors in endocytosis was then elegantly shown by Georg Borner from Scottie Robinson's lab: Using a combination of quantitative mass spectrometry and Principal Component Analysis, he presented exciting data suggesting the existence at least 36 previously uncharacterised components of clathrin-coated vesicles.

Whatever their role may turn out to be, one thing is clear: It's still a long way until we can see the big picture.

Name: A. Manjarrez

Location: Vienna, Austria.

Date: 13th September 2011

Event: The EMBO meeting.

Well, so the EMBO meeting is over. I think it was quite obvious how molecular biology has permeated in all areas of biology as the diversity of fields involved in the sessions was quite broad.

But one of the subjects tackled that I personally found fascinating was the focus on neurosciences. We were warmed up for the topic on Wednesday by a talk by May-Britt Moser, who was one of the winners of the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine this year. She shared with us some of the amazing research that, together with her husband Edvard Moser and their team, she had carried on during the last decade. One of their most important discoveries was the existence of the grid cells. By studying mice moving across a field limited by a box, they found that there were cells in the entorhinal cortex of the brain (which is between the hippocampus and the neocortex) that fire action potentials only when the animal is at a particular position in the two-dimensional space. Strikingly, by looking at the complete picture of where the neurons fire the action potential, a hexagonal pattern is observed, having equilateral triangles as the repeating units. This map is created inside the brain and does not come from the outside world, which I found amazing. If you want to know further about the topic, my colleague Debbie made an interview to Edvard Moser (http://proteintech.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/mapping-in-the-brain-interview-with-edvard-moser/), where he describes the process behind some of their discoveries.

Then Thursday was the big day for the 'brain' session. It started with Richard Axel talking about how olfactory information is received by individual neurons in the nose, and depending on the odor, a particular spatial map of excitation is formed in the olfactory bulb. He was followed by three interesting talks discussing behaviour and emotions in animals. Watching photos of solitary nematodes and movies of aggressive flies and listening to the speakers' stories, it became clear that the understanding of the molecular basis of behaviour is advancing quite fast, though the field is still young. I'm sure that for those of us who are not so familiar with the recent discoveries in neurosciences, these lectures were impressive. I guess the brain mysteries solved -or raised- always are.

I appreciated very much the selection of speakers this year, as it is not easy to find so many brilliant people together and, again, the diversity of the topics tackled. I'm looking forward to the next EMBO meeting in Nice, France!