Since 1980, the Developmental Biology of the Sea Urchin and other Marine Invertebrates (DBSUMI) Meeting has been held every 18 months. The Marine Biological Laboratory will host the 26th conference in this series in April 2020, bringing together an international community of researchers who use sea urchins and a wide variety of marine invertebrates as research models, with the goal of fostering collaboration and resource sharing. The community focuses broadly on cellular, developmental, and evolutionary biology questions and research, with an emphasis on systems-level gene regulatory network tools and analyses. There are many different marine animal models currently used in this research, including XXXX. The research being done in these and other taxa now are revealing many fundamental processes relevant to human health in the areas of development, regeneration, neurogenesis, toxicology, and tissue homeostasis, which are not as accessible in canonical vertebrate and invertebrate model systems. In this meeting, we will emphasize research using these aquatic models for critical insights into the full range of human disease. Information and collaborative exchange of ideas will be disseminated through a series of plenary and concurrent speaker sessions as well as social events revolving around poster sessions. To increase the meeting?s exposure? we are planning to publish the proceedings for this meeting in a special issue of a scientific journal. We are making a dedicated effort to recruit new investigators, women, investigators with disabilities and under-represented minorities. For example, to make the meeting more of a forum for junior level scientists we will introduce afternoon ?lightning talks? for the first time to highlight each evening?s poster session and scheduled lunchtime table ?themes? focused on career training and data dissemination. We are also creating the first pre-meeting workshop focused on relevant recently developed techniques (e.g. genome editing, single cell RNAseq) that are critical for the marine invertebrate community. Finally, we are generating a plenary session to provide investigators with ideas, background, and mentoring required to improve the quality of grant applications submitted to multiple NIH institutes.
The systems-level analyses made in sea urchins and other marine invertebrates (e.g., other echinoderms, tunicates, cephalochordates, hemichordates, mollusks, polychaetes, cnidarians, ctenophores, and sponges) have lead to insights into many fundamental processes relevant to human health in the areas of development, regeneration, neurogenesis, toxicology, and tissue homeostasis. This conference will bring together scientists, postdocs and graduate students from the US and around the world to ensure the growth of the invertebrate marine community and explore recent developments in technology, study design and data analysis that will inform biomedical research applicable to human development and disease.
