Great news just in, with a new paper "accepted in principle" at Cell Reports! This work is a collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Mary Goll,  located across the street at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Like our lab, Mary also uses the zebrafish as an animal model, and she is an expert at studying DNA methylation. We are also interested in how DNA methylation controls gene expression during development, so we worked together on a project studying the function of TET genes, which encode enzymes that can help remove DNA methylation (and thus, perhaps, turn on specific genes). Most of the effort was carried out by Mary's very talented graduate student Cheng Li. More details on this work to follow (after it is officially accepted), but postdoctoral fellow Yahui Lan from our lab helped Cheng show that TET genes are critical for the embryo to produce hematopoietic stem cells (stem cells that make all the blood cells).

Yahui (you may go look her up now!) came to us last year from Hong Kong, where she obtained her PhD working in the laboratory of Zilong Wen. She is second author on Cheng's new paper. But in fact, it's already her second (second) author paper, as she also helped our postdoctoral fellow Karen Mendelson with her paper, which was recently accepted to Developmental Dynamics. This was Karen's second (first) author paper (are you following), which is focused on how the sphingosine phospholipid signaling pathway regulates cardiovascular development. Karen's project is itself a collaboration with the laboratory here at WCMC of Dr. Timothy Hla, who is a world-expert in this pathway, and with whom we have already co-published a number of papers investigating S1P in embryonic development. Karen is also first author on a review we all wrote together last year for Development.

So...in summary...2 recent papers accepted that were made possible because of collaborations with 2 different laboratories. And as you surely recall, collaborations were key to the papers published last month by Su-Yi and Miriam. 

Why is this so? Why don't we just stay hunkered down in our own lab? Science is actually a very creative and collaborative process and different people bring distinct ideas, perspectives, and skill-sets that can all contribute to push the work in new directions and make us all more productive. This is particularly true in academic science, and it is these collaborations that make lifetime connections, working groups, and (added bonus) friendships.

Finally, sorry but I made a mistake in the last post. We moved here to the Department of Surgery at WCMC in 2009, not 2006. Just a typo, but its important in science to always get the facts right, and double-check the numbers!

Todd

Well, here goes. 

This is the initial post for a new blog that we will use for 2 purposes. First, we will shamelessly promote recent events that are related to our research here at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. We are a group of biomedical researchers trained in developmental and stem cell biology, focussed on how organs develop during embryogenesis, with a goal of using this information to eventually develop new therapies for human disease. But anyway, please explore the rest of the website for that stuff. What about the blog? Well, science can be hard, slow and often quite frustrating (at least if you are doing it right!). So, we need to occasionally take the time to celebrate achievements, big and small. Members of our group include students and fellows, and so we may be celebrating papers being published, grants funded, graduations, promotions, etc.

Second, we will try to give some insight into what it is like to be a scientist in academia. It is not going to be highly technical (read our papers for that!) but more tuned to those who might be considering this alternative lifestyle. Fortunately, it can be a very fun and satisfying career, especially since your research group becomes like a second family.  

Since the lab has been functioning since 1990, there is a bit of catching up to do. To summarize the past 25 years, we started out originally at the University of Pittsburgh, then moved in 1995 to Albert Einstein in "da Bronx", and then moved down here to the upper east side of Manhattan in 2006. I hope that you get to know many of the lab members through this blog.

A few recent publications need to be highlighted. Su-Yi Tsai's paper was recently published in Stem Cell Reports, where she describes how she discovered a way to make an important cardiac cell type from embryonic stem cells. This represents over two years of work and could only be done through collaboration with Shuibing Chen's laboratory here at WCMC and also our colleague Dr. Glenn Fishman at the NYU Medical School. We collaborate quite often, so get used to these shout-outs. Also, Miriam Gordillo's extensive review of liver development was published in Development, in collaboration with Dr. Valerie Gouon-Evans from the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Great work everyone!! 

We will supply links to these papers in our publication page (the website is currently being updated by Emily Mercer who is  now officially our web-czarina). Thanks so much Em! BTW, when people are mentioned in the blog, you are meant to go find them in the "people" section of the website!  Go ahead!

As a scientist it is not unusual to travel for work. I had the recent opportunity to visit Helsinki Finland, as an invited speaker for the University's Graduate School Symposium. It is a lovely city and a fun event. One of the things I noticed was how you can walk, jog, or bike everywhere, and the large sidewalks always have lanes marked off for safety. For example, walking lanes always show a large graphic of an adult and young person holding hands and walking. I wish I had taken a picture of it to show you, but I really liked it because it reminds you to stay out of the bike lane (which could otherwise be deadly) and it also reminds you that it should be perfectly normal for parents and kids to be out walking around together. Its a nice idea. I failed to snap a photo of that, but maybe someone can do that for me and I'll load it to the blog. Little help??

Meanwhile, I did snap a photo of a salmon appetizer, shown below with salmon done three ways. I bet you didn't expect to see this in a science blog, eh? Well, it turns out that they have discovered many many ways to do salmon in Finland, so I tried as many of them as I could.

Coming up next: Lab picnic later this week in Central Park. Injury report to follow.   Todd

New to our website: blog updates from Todd (and maybe some other keen lab members) to let you know what we've been up to, the big breakthroughs in our field and what we really think about the new PCR machine. Who can wait?! Not me!