Tissue regeneration at the single-cell level

Experts in tissue regeneration research and single-cell sequencing from around the world will meet virtually for a special edition of the Berlin Summer Meeting 2020 in December. Hosted by the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), the annual event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It will now take place as a virtual meeting, ensuring the long-standing series continues uninterrupted.

The Berlin Summer Meeting is known for bringing together computational and experimental research in biology. This year’s conference features tissue regeneration and the latest single cell sequencing technologies, which provide an unprecedented level of detail about cell types and their activities in space and time.

“Single cell technologies are revolutionizing many aspects of biology, but they are especially powerful for tissue regeneration,” says Dr. Jan Philipp Junker, who heads the Quantitative Developmental Biology Lab at MDC’s Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology, and a member of the organizing committee. “They are helping bring order to the chaos of the repair and regeneration processes following organ injury.”

Animal superpowers

While humans have some ability to repair wounds, other species excel at regeneration: for example, zebrafish regrow heart tissue, African spiny mice regrow lost skin, and salamanders regrow spinal cords and whole limbs. Researchers study these and other animals to understand the complex regeneration process and look for insights that can inform human tissue regeneration and organ growth.

The conference will feature talks from top researchers studying regeneration processes of the heart, liver, pancreas, spinal cord, retina, intestine and brain in animals and organoids – miniature organ-like structures grown in the lab. They will share their latest findings and discuss how single cell technologies are pushing the field forward. “I think this is going to be a really fun, entertaining and informative conference,” Junker says.

Equal expertise

The scientific committee is pleased to present a gender-balanced line-up of speakers, says Dr. Mina Gouti, who heads MDC’s Stem Cell Modeling of Development and Disease Lab, and member of the organizing committee. “I am looking forward to getting a broad overview of the current developments in the field,” Gouti says. “With 40 minutes for the invited talks, there is more time to tell a complete story followed by a lively discussion.”

The conference will also feature short presentations by students and early career researchers.

The Berlin Scientific Meeting 2020 Scientific Committee includes: Dr. Mina Gouti, Dr. Jan Philipp Junker, Dr. Darío G. Lupiáñez, Dr. Daniela Panakova, Dr. Suphansa Sawamiphak, Dr. Elly Tanaka and Dr. Robert Zinzen.

Speakers

Dr. Kerstin Bartscherer
Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht, Netherlands

Assistant Prof. Alex Gregorieff
McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Dr. Meritxell Huch
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany

Prof. Marisa Karow
University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

Assistant Prof. Prisca Liberali
Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel, Switzerland

Dr. Jakob Metzger
BIMSB, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany

Prof. Hesham A. Sadek
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, USA

Prof. Didier Stainier
Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, Bad Nauheim, Germany

Prof. Elly Tanaka
Research Institute for Molecular Pathology, Vienna, Austria

Prof. Ulrich Technau
University of Vienna, Austria

Further information and registration

https://berlin-summer-meeting.org/

https://www.mdc-berlin.de/form/registration-13th-berlin-summer-