Happy New Year of the Horse

It was a lot of fun helping with scientific advice on this beautifully produced children’s book on marine biology. Published in the summer of 2024 by Weldon Owen Children’s Books. Written by Catherine Ard and illustrated by Paul Daviz.

We’re delighted to say that our paper “Evolutionary diversification of the canonical Wnt signaling effector TCF/LEF in chordates” in
Development Growth & Differentiation 64 (3), 120-137, 2022, has been awarded the DGD Wiley Prize for the most downloaded paper of 2022. Congratulations to Nuria Torres Aguila, Marika Salonna and Stefan Hoppler.

https://en.jsdb.jp/about_awards.html

This paper was in a special issue on Marine Genomics, edited by Prof S. Yaguchi and Prof H. Wada, and the main summary figure from our paper was featured on the front cover (bottom right).

The book Hox Modules in Evolution and Development has been published, in the evolutionary cell biology series edited by Prof Brian Hall and Prof Sally Moody for CRC Press, Taylor & Francis. It was a pleasure to edit this book and many thanks to all of the contributing authors. It’s a fascinating read!

As part of a visit of a governmental and industrial delegation from the Rhineland Palatinate to Scotland, we had the pleasure of introducing  Ciona intestinalis sea squirts to Mr Clemens Hoch (the Minister for Science and Health), along with PD Dr Sigrid Rieuwerts (Commissioner for Scotland at Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz) and Dr Hendrik von Büren (Senior Director and Managing Director of Research and development AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co), whilst they toured the Scottish Oceans Institute.

It was wonderful to host Miss Xueqing Li in the lab over the summer of 2022 with the support of a Gurdon summer scholarship, thanks to the British Society of Developmental Biology. Xueqing was working on the canonical Wnt signalling pathway in the sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis.