FISEB meeting happens every three years, and it includes participants from 28 different experimental biology societies in Israel. It is the best meeting to learn about biological-medical research performed in Israel at all fields and doctrines.
4 days, 8-10 parallel sessions, hundreds of lectures, >1000 posters, >2200 participants.
The first day started by a plenary lecture by Aryeh Warshel, Nobel lauret. He is really far from my field, and his lecture was very much confusing to me. But he has nice cartoons 🙂 The bottom line – enzymes are able to catalyze reactions due to electrostatic connections that are maintained stable (unlike in water).
From the afternoon sessions, I chose “signaling pathways & networks”. Relevant to this blog:
Yoav Henis from Tel-Aviv Uni. talked about oligomerization of TGF-beta receptors. he used a method he calls “co-patching”, which is essentially IF with two different antibodies for two receptor subunits. homodimerization will yield single color “patch” whereas heterodimerization will yield an overlap of both colors (co-patch). He then looked at the % of co-patch with different receptor subunits with/without ligand, or with mutants.
Maya Schulinder from Weizmann Institute talked about the contacts between mitochondria and other organelles (ER, vacuole) in yeast. These contacts are important for lipid metabolism. She new about the mito-ER contact but found there must be a second contact (bypass mechanism). She used an interesting screen method to find the bypass mechanism to the mito-ER contact: she expressed one of the contact protein as a GFP fusion. She expected that if the bypass mechanism and the mito-ER contact “share the load” of lipid metabolism, then deletion of the bypass will increase the number of the mito-ER contacts to compensate. Using automation, she imaged 6200 deletion mutants (from the yeast deletion library) each expressing this GFP fusion. As expected, she found 4 candidates which turned out to be very interesting.
Roni Seger from Weizmann showed that targeting the nuclear localization signal of ERK can be a novel cure for certain pathologies, including certain types of cancer.
On the other hand, Maya Zigler from the Hebrew Uni. suggested another new idea to cure cancer – by inducing the surrounding immune cells to destroy the tumor.
Ido Amit from Weizmann as well told us that we may not really know all the different types of cells that exist. What most people do, particularly in immunology, is rely on one or two known “markers” and use FACS or other methods to sort the cells based on these markers. However, some of the markers overlap. and there may be cells for which we do not have any markers and they “disappear” in the crowd of unsorted cells. or, the could be further sub-types we do not know about. So he approached the problem in an unbiased way – he took all the cells in the spleen, and did single cell RNA seq to individual cells from the spleen. Thus, each cell type has several hundred/thousand “markers” based on gene expression profiles. Not only did this method agree with the common FACS sorting markers, but he identified several sub-types unknown before. Expect his paper this month in Science. His paper just got published in Science.
Finally, Yaron Shav-tal from Bar-Ilan Uni. used the MS2 system to study how perturbing the signaling pathway of serum stimulation affects transcription of beta-actin gene. As per usual – very neat job and interesting results.
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