News Splash Issue 17 Spring 2024

Letter from the President

For our community, 2024 has started well, with a vibrant January SCZI (Strategic Conference of Zebrafish Investigators) in Asilomar, demonstrating that zebrafish-based research is steadily delivering essential insights into biological mechanisms.  The conference showcased a new generation of outstanding team leaders, tackling the most important biological challenges with great successes. Biological research has never been more exciting, having at our fingertips the most powerful set of technologies to probe the living.  SCZI 2024 showed us that our zebrafish research community embraced these. The next years promise to be transformative for our understanding of the molecular spatio-temporal dynamics controlling the formation and homeostasis of all organs. The conference was slightly over-subscribed, indicating a sustained interest of our members for in-person meetings.  

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Science Spotlight

In each issue of the News Splash 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. If you are interested in participating in this mentored science writing opportunity by writing an article for a future issue, contact Science Spotlight editors Cecilia Moens (cmoens@fredhutch.org) and/or Karuna Sampath (K.Sampath@warwick.ac.uk).

A New Solution for Sharing Zebrafish Lines
By Dr. Soaleha Shams

This Science Spotlight highlights a new report that describes a method for keeping zebrafish sperm viable for up to a month at room temperature that may revolutionize the way that zebrafish lines can be shared.

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Shot through the (silent) heart: Conditional Cardiac Arrest that  Gives Degrons a Good Name
By Dr. Timothy Hufford

This Science Spotlight covers a side-by-side evaluation of two elegant genetic tools for conditional knockout of a gene/gene product of interest. In the described work, Thomas Juan used the Cre-mediated recombination and degron-based loss of protein approaches to target the sarcomeric protein Tnnt2a to temporally recapitulate the silent heart mutant phenotype (Juan et al., 2024). 

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Meet the PI

Each issue of the News Splash highlights the research and careers of PIs who are members of the IZFS. We ask 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 PI Features

Meet the Researcher 

Each issue of the newsletter also highlights the research and developing careers of undergraduate, graduate and post-doc members of the IZFS: where they came from, where they hope to go, their challenges and inspirations.  

Click here to read the Meet the Researcher Feature.

Catching Up with ZFIN

An Interview with Dr. Monte Westerfield

In 2016, the NIH changed the way that model organism databases are supported, a change that had a major impact on ZFIN. We caught up with Dr. Monte Westerfield, professor at the University of Oregon Institute of Neuroscience and the director of ZFIN, to talk about ZFIN: what it does, how it works, how it is supported now, and what its future looks like. 

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2023 European Zebrafish Conference (EZC) Meeting Recap

By Florence Marlow and Emily Noel

In July 2023, around 500 zebrafish researchers arrived in the beautiful Polish city of Kraków for the 12th European Zebrafish meeting. The meeting was held in the fantastic Auditorium Maximum of Jagiellonian University (see photos). The meeting was not only a forum to share, listen to, and discuss world-class science, but also a welcome opportunity to reconnect with former colleagues and friends in the shoal. For those of you who couldn’t make the meeting (and those of you who could, but would like to reminisce), with the help of the session chairs we’ve outlined some session highlights below. But first a shout-out to those excellent talks and projects that we haven’t been able to include here due to space constraints - the meeting was absolutely jam-packed with great science!

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Member News

Click here to read about fellowships, awards and honors bestowed on zebrafish community members.

Upcoming Events

Mid-Atlantic Regional Zebrafish Meeting
April 26, 2024
New Brunswick, NJ, USA

2nd Canadian Zebrafish Research Community Meeting
May 14, 2024
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

MBL "Zebrafish Development and Genetics" Summer Course
July 25 - August 8, 2024
Chicago, IL, USA

18th International Zebrafish Conference
August 17-21, 2024
Kyoto, Japan

11th Annual International Zebrafish Husbandry Course
September 30 - October 4, 2024
Buguggiate (VA) - Italy

Neural Circuits and Behavior in Fish
December 8-11, 2024
Eilat, Isreal

19th International Zebrafish Conference
July 9-13, 2025
Madison, WI, USA

Job Posts

To post to the IZFS Job Board you must be a member. Click here to join. If you have a job to post, please send an e-mail to info@izfs.org

Have an idea for the newsletter or would like to contribute? Contact us at info@izfs.org! We'd love to hear from you!