About the Workshop
Recent technical innovations such as genome editing, next-generation sequencing, single-cell omics, modern imaging technologies are transforming today’s biology. The new technologies allow us to study ANY organisms at ANY levels from molecular to a group of individuals, which has been especially difficult for exotic non-model organisms until recently. Such exotic organisms facilitate exciting new questions that can be asked for the first time, or facilitate unprecedented ability to explore long-standing fundamental questions in life sciences. Also, these new technologies promote our understanding of the organisms of interest at a wide range of scales from molecular, cellular, organ, individual even to interactions between species (e.g. symbiosis and sociality), which we term "Trans-Scale Biology"
Nevertheless, establishing new models is still a big challenge. In this EMBO | Company of Biologists Workshop, we invite researchers who are pioneering new biology using exotic non-model organisms. While some issues such as breeding methods are specific to each model system, many issues including the development of genome editing and imaging protocol, genomic resources are common problems. We hope researchers can exchange useful information across the species and disciplines.
This EMBO | Company of Biologists Workshop will be held in Okazaki, Japan on the initiative of National Institute for Basic Biology (NIBB). Since NIBB is the institute serving as a center of excellence in cooperation with other universities and research organizations in Japan, we aim to nurture the scientific community of Japanese and European scientists by leveraging the framework of the EMBO|Company of Biologists Workshop.
About the Satellite meeting (July 28th (Fri), 2023, at Okazaki)
A satellite meeting related to the EMBO Workshop will be held at the same venue on July 28th (Fri), 2023. The meeting title is "New Approaches for the Properties of Bio-materials". This meeting is organized by two KAKENHI research groups in Japan and is focusing on "Bioimaging in scattering and fluctuating fields" and "Body shape and construction". For detail, please visit the meeting website.
If you wish to join the satellite meeting, please register from the website.
About the top image
Prof. Shuji Shigenobu (NIBB, JP), an organizer of this workshop, and his colleagues have discovered that the eusocial aphid Ceratovacuna japonica (right figure: the aphid colony on the bamboo glass) horbors two symbiotic bacteria, Buchnera and Arsenophorus (left figure: an electron microscopic image of these symbionts), forming a co-obligate symbiosis. Both symbionts reside in the same host organ, but within distinct specialized cells. The localization of Buchnera is labeled with green and that of Arsenophorus is labeled with magenta in the middle figure. The genomes of both symbiotic bacteria were determined and the researchers found that metabolic and developmental integration exists among the two symbionts and the host, as illustrated in the inset in the left figure which displays the genome structure of Buchnera.
Ref: Yorimoto et al. (2022) iScience, 25, 105478. DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105478
This EMBO Workshop was made possible by funding provided by The Company of Biologists.
About EMBO Courses and Workshops
EMBO Courses and Workshops are selected for their excellent scientific quality and timelines, provision of good networking activities for all participants and speaker gender diversity (at least 40% of speakers must be from the underrepresented gender).
Organisers are encouraged to implement measures to make the meeting environmentally more sustainable.
