With the support of PharmaTox we were able to attend the 2nd Neurogenesis conference organized in the period March 5th to March 8th in the old pirate haven of Nassau, Bahamas, where we enjoyed swimming with sea turtles, stringrays and sharks under cloudless skies for the better part of a week. The conference drew in world-class expertise in neurogenesis and related subfields, with talks and posters covering both new findings and development of new methods in embryonic stem cell development in the neural lineage; adult neurogenesis; and stem-cell based neural disease modeling.
Presenters included Fred H. Gage of the Salk Insistute, who contextualized neurogenesis to the development of autism spectrum disorder and described a novel method of using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells in the profiling of the molecular underpinnings of the disorder. Jonas Frisén of Karolinska Institute presented a method employing atmospheric 14C that he hopes will settle the debate over whether adult neurogenesis takes place or not, in addition to aiding in quantifying the rate at which neurogenesis occurs. Guo-li Ming of the University of Pennsylvania described how brain organoids composed of heterogeneous brain areas and produced using high-throughput spinning bioreactors recapitulate the development of the nervous system, complete with organotypic neural and glial development, neuronal migration, cortical layering, and axonal projection patterns.
Photo: private
The conference was packed to the brim with interesting and relevant content, with talks being followed up with discussions from beach-side dinner and late into the pool-side night. From novel mechanistic insights into normal and abnormal neural development, to method and model development employable in neurotoxicology studies, the conference covered all the bases that our own studies involve. We would like to thank PharmaTox for supporting our visit to this fantastic conference and the venue it was organized at.
Photo: private
Photo: private
Nils A. Labba (The Neurobiology and Toxicology group at the School of Pharmacy, UiO)
Martin Falck (The Chromatome Team, UiO)