News Splash Issue 16 Fall 2023
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Letter from the President
- continue reading - Letter from the Outgoing President
- continue reading - Science SpotlightEach issue, we invite two early-career members of the zebrafish community to write an article in the newsletter covering recent high-impact zebrafish publications of their choice: one a technological innovation publication and one a new biological discovery. The Biological Discovery article in this issue is written by C. M. Santosh Kumar, a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK., while the Technology Development article in this issue of the News Splash is written by Vindhya Chaganty, is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, A*STAR in Singapore If you are interested in a mentored science writing opportunity to contribute a Science Spotlight article for a future issue of the News Splash, contact Cecilia Moens (cmoens@fredhutch.org) and/or Karuna Sampath (K.Sampath@warwick.ac.uk). Fishing for clues in skeletons of: an ancestral gene linked to a recent tuberculosis outbreak. This spotlight highlights a recent study published in the journal Cell, where zebrafish were used to unravel a mysterious outbreak of a bone-eating tuberculosis (TB) disease. Tuberculosis (TB) is the most lethal infectious disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) and results in about 2M deaths annually, with an additional one third of the world’s population being latently infected (WHO Report 2022). - continue reading - Finding Your Way Through the Zebrafish Brain. The development of neural circuitry can be actively mapped using dynamic expression of genes that act as molecular landmarks of neuronal subpopulations. Additionally, the function of neurons can depend on their connectivity to other neurons and behavioural stimuli. This makes it important to have visualisation tools that can integrate multiple modalities allowing us to correlate gene expression, circuit connectivity and functional activity. - continue reading - Meet the IZFS AwardeesIn this special issue of the News Splash, IZFS highlights two award winners from across the globe. We have asked them to answer questions that were developed with input from graduate students and postdocs, reflecting their curiosity about the issues and challenges faced by zebrafish PIs from around the world.
Click here to read the Meet the Awardee features. Meet the International AwardeesCongratulations to the winner of the Chinese Zebrafish Society Lifetime Achievement Award Winner, Anming Meng and the European Zebrafish Society’s CNV Award Winner, Mary Mullins.
Click here to read the Meet the International Awardee features. FISHues Around the World
- continue reading - Congratulations to the Newly Elected Board Members!
Member News
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There has never been a more exciting time to be a scientist! My first piece as President of the IZFS had to start with this sentence. The last ten years has seen an explosion of technologies to elucidate the most important questions in biology and biomedicine. Applying these to the zebrafish provides unprecedented opportunities for transformative research. And in a world in environmental instability, scientific approaches have never been more important. The IZFS has a key role to play in this new era. Our ambition is to provide support and tools to deliver the best zebrafish research across the world, reducing inequalities in the opportunities given to scientific communities across the gender, cultural and geographic landscapes. 
It is hard to believe a year has flown by since I wrote my message as the incoming President in the Summer 2022 News Splash (Issue 13). I write this letter as the outgoing President, having left the flowers bursting forth in our unusually early spring in Chile to visit my family in an unsettling, vibrant green fall in northern New York state. Today the eighteenth of September marks the date that Chile began fighting for independence from Spain (September 18th, 1810), a dream that was not fully realized until eight years later with the official declaration of independence on February 12, 1818.
As part of our efforts to bring together scientists from around the world who use zebrafish as a model system, we are launching “FISHues Around the World” where we reach out to scientists in countries whose voices are generally not represented in the international research community. We will start with a colleague in Ghana, Prof. Patrick Amoateng, and his experience incorporating zebrafish into his research program and establishing a fish facility at the University of Ghana School of Pharmacy. 
Dorsal view of a three-week-old transgenic zebrafish showing lymphatic vessels in orange (Tg(mrc1a:egfp)y251) and bones and scales in blue (Tg(Ola.Sp7:mCherry-Eco.NfsB)pd46). This image won the 2021 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition was featured on a US postage stamp in the summer of 2023. Image courtesy of Daniel Castranova and Bakary Samasa, Weinstein Lab, NICHD, NIH.| IZFS Newsletter Committee | Contributors | ||
| Cecilia Moens | Rebecca Burdine | Madeline Ryan | |
| Ken Poss | Karuna Sampath | Corinne Houart | |
| Brant Weinstein | Han Wang | Santosh Kumar | |
| Kathleen Whitlock | Tanya Whitfield | Vindhya Chaganty | |