Cell and Developmental Biology of Xenopus: 2016 Course at Cold Spring Harbor

Dear Colleagues,

We are asking for your assistance to promote the 2016 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: CRISPR based gene modification and biological imaging.  We plan to ask students for genes of interest, help them design CRISPR targeting constructs, and phenotype embryos after CRISPR mediated depletion of the gene product using all of the power of Xenopus. This was a big hit last year, and we hope will continue to be motivating for students to bring their own projects to the course.

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. This was a huge success last year and offers the possibility to try light-sheet, high-speed live confocal, and super-resolution imaging methods.

     Important Dates:
          Course: April 5-18, 2016
          Application Due Date: January 31, 2016

We have an exciting list of speakers/instructors including:

Ira Blitz, University of California, Irvine
Sang-Wook Cha, Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center
Frank Conlon, University of North Carolina
Helene Cousin, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Lance Davidson, University of Pittsburgh
Heithem El-Hodiri, Nationwide Childrens Hospital Research Institute
Rebecca Heald, University of California, Berkeley
Raymond Keller, University of Virginia
Ann Miller, University of Michigan
Gerald Thomsen, Stony Brook University
John Wallingford, University of Texas at Austin
Andrea Wills, University of Washington

For more information and application submission, please visit:
http://meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx?course=C-XENO&year=16

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.
     germ cell transplants to raise CRISPR lines
     homologous recombination in Xenopus with CRISPR
     live Imaging and fluorescence - movies, photography and figure design
     transgenesis