Author: Sara Verstraeten

by Sara Formichetti

It took me a while to metabolise the last two days I spent at the Porto Turistico of Ostia, close to Rome (the city where I was born and raised). We – Italian-speaking volunteers from EMBL Rome – took part in an outreach event organised by the educational association Adamas Scienza and EMBL Rome on the occasion of the Italian stopover of the boat Tara. Why is this boat so special? Because it’s a private boat at the service of the international scientific community. The crew of researchers are studying the global oceanic ecosystem and the impacts of ongoing climate change and plastic pollution.

My role as a volunteer was to guide organised tours of the boat (which were fully booked a month in advance!) for the general public. I will explain some of the reasons why this experience was so motivating for me – both as a scientist and as a citizen of the world.

Continue reading “Tara sails to Ostia”

By Irene Ayuso Jimeno

This video shows neurons (in green) that control instinctive behaviours such as defence. They are located in the periaqueductal grey or PAG: an area in the midbrain with an important role in behavioural responses to stressors like threats or pain.

Credit: Irene Ayuso Jimeno (Gross group) / EMBL

Continue reading “Stunning science: Neurons that control defence”

by Nicolas Descostes

In recent years, big data is a term that invaded the media and that the public has been exposed to. From finance to social networks, data are collected to infer trends and sometimes to manipulate opinions as it has been observed during recent elections. However, the public is less aware of the big data revolution that is occurring in biology. In this post, I would like to begin by explaining how big data is used in biology, and more specifically in genomics, and end by sharing some thoughts on how big data is currently shaping research.

In the early 2000’s, a battle opposed J. Craig Venter and the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium to publish the first sequencing data of the human genome. The race produced two articles published in Science and Nature but more importantly, opened an intellectual revolution giving new possibilities to explore the 3 billion base-pair DNA sequence of the human genome in its entirety. Even if sequencing was used a long time before, sequencing the human genome opened the door to sequencing the genome of many other species.

Continue reading “On big data in biology”

By Santiago Rompani

Biological research has never been more vibrant and interesting, but the flipside is an ever-increasing number of studies to keep track of. Gone are the days when the ponderous intellectual could leaf through the latest journals while twirling a goblet of brandy or smouldering pipe. Therefore, I had to come up with other ways to keep up with the scientific literature.

The first is to spend a few minutes to learn how pubmed searches work, watch a tutorial here. Then register for “My NCBI”, which is free and allows you to setup automated pubmed searches and have the website output any new results every day via email. I have searches setup for specific scientists I wish follow, like “gross cornelius[Author]” (use without the quotation marks). I also have more complex searches for keywords in particular journals such as “(Lateral Geniculate) AND (“Nature”[Journal] OR “Science (New York, N.Y.)”[Journal] OR “elife”[Journal])” (the list of journals in my actual search is very long, again, don’t include the quotation marks, but keep the square brackets).

Continue reading “Staying up to date and organised with scientific literature”

By Sara Formichetti

When I was asked to write a post about the last Science & Society talk we had at our EMBL site in Rome I was particularly excited. Science & Society lectures are all about the impact of science on society and the speakers work in fields that are of utmost relevance to the public – but often misunderstood.

Most recently, Giuseppe Testa spoke at EMBL Rome. Testa works on epigenetic regulation, cell reprogramming and disease models. His talk dealt with the impact of epigenetics on society, which is a concern for all of us working at EMBL Rome, considering that we recently chose to rename our unit “Epigenetics and Neurobiology” to focus the interests of new group leaders in these two fields.

Continue reading “Why is Epigenetics so sexy? And other related questions.”