Cell and Developmental Biology of Xenopus: 2015 Course at Cold Spring Harbor

Update:

9-21 April 2015 Cold Spring Harbor Lab Xenopus course:

Xenopus is an extraordinary in vivo model for cell and developmental biology. The ease of loss- and gain-of-function approaches allows rapid mechanistic analysis; this can be combined with classic embryological manipulations and state of the art imaging. As advances in human genomics rapidly expand our list of novel disease genes, Xenopus is emerging as a powerful, high-throughput system for studying unknown gene function.

For this year's course, we are fortunate to have two fully funded fellowships for applicants who come from non-standard backgrounds (ie, physics, math, computer science, engineering), as well as several half scholarships for people entirely new to Xenopus.

Informal queries to Karen Liu (karen.liu@kcl.ac.uk) or Mustafa Khokha (mustafa.khokha@yale.edu).

Deadline for applications: 23 February.

http://meetings.cshl.edu/courses/2015/c-xeno15.shtml

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Dear Colleagues,

We would like to ask for your assistance to promote the 2015 Xenopus Course at Cold Spring Harbor. As many of you know, the Xenopus course at CSH has a long tradition of training the next generation of Xenopus researchers in critical skills to exploit Xenopus for understanding cell and developmental biology.

In addition to the traditional skills taught in the Xenopus course, this year, we hope to emphasize two approaches: disease gene modeling and biological imaging.  We plan to ask students for genes of interest, help them design CRISPR targeting constructs, and phenotype embryos to simulate human diseases such as congenital malformations.

In addition, we have the good fortune of overlapping with the Quantitative Imaging (QI) course at CSH. We plan to build interactions between our groups to image Xenopus embryos using the latest imaging methods. To this end, we have co-invited Scott Fraser and will have formal opportunities to interact with QI.

Finally, we hope to tailor the course for 1) students totally new to Xenopus and 2) students already skilled in Xenopus that are interested in starting their own labs or building additional skills.

We have an exciting list of confirmed speakers/instructors including:

    Helene Cousin
    Lance Davidson
    Heithem El-Hodiri
    Scott Fraser
    Rebecca Heald
    Ray Keller
    Marc Kirschner
    Rachel Miller
    Nancy Papalopulu
    John Wallingford

A list of topics to be covered is shown below.
Please distribute to any and all students that might be interested.

 
Applications are due Jan 31, 2015
For more information and application submission, please visit:
http://meetings.cshl.edu/courses/2015/c-xeno15.shtml

Thanks,

    Mustafa Khokha, Yale University
    Karen Liu, King’s College, London

Course objectives:

Microinjection, microdissection, and grafts - Organizer, animal cap, neural crest and more
In situ hybridization
Immunohistochemistry
CRISPR and MO loss of function.
Imaging, microscopy methods, and fluorescence - movies, photography and figure design
Transgenesis
Setting up a frog lab - aquatics and microinjection setups/microscopy