27 January 2022

For Dr Anne-Karina Perl, an associate professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, November 2021 was truly uplifting. Almost two years into the coronavirus pandemic, she was finally heading to an in-person meeting in the form of the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Lung Development, Injury and Repair. Even more significantly, this was a conference that she herself had coordinated, steering the meeting through the uncertainties of the pandemic with the help of Dr Daniel Tschumperlin, Dr Rory Morty, and Dr Xin Sun.

13 January 2022

This blog is written by Alastair Downie, Head of IT at The Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, who has been kind enough to share his thoughts on hybrid meetings.

16 December 2021

When Professors Barbara Niemeyer and Nicolas Demaurex agreed to organise the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) conference on Calcium and Cell Function, little did they know how adaptive they would need to be. As the coronavirus pandemic rumbled on, it became increasingly clear that they would need to make some tough decisions about how their meeting was to go ahead.

22 November 2021

The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is a vast creature, reaching up to five metres long. The shark grows very slowly but can reach this impressive size because it is also incredibly long-lived, with reports of some sharks living for up to 400 years.

13 October 2021

We are looking forward to starting a discussion on hybrid events and the related new technologies. In this post, Alastair Downie, Head of IT at the Gurdon Institute and Director at The Company of Biologists shares his thoughts.

21 January 2022

In the 1990s, researchers performed the first large-scale genetic mutagenesis screens in zebrafish. They were led by Professor Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard in Tübingen, Germany, and Professor Wolfgang Driever in Boston, USA. This huge effort resulted in 37 research articles, which were published together in a special issue of Development. These articles described hundreds of different mutants with phenotypes that affected almost every tissue in the developing fish.

4 January 2022

For 2021, Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology exceeded their targets for Open Access growth.

9 December 2021

The Company of Biologists organises Workshops that bring together leading experts and early-career researchers from a range of scientific backgrounds. The coronavirus pandemic didn’t dampen our enthusiasm, and we invested in online conferencing platforms which allowed us to host virtual Workshops in 2020/21. With in-person Workshops back for 2022, we thought it would be a good opportunity to explain what makes these events so valuable, particularly for early-career researchers.

21 October 2021

Emissions from travelling are a significant component of an event’s footprint. There are multiple factors that influence the total number of these emissions such as location, number of attendees, weather, individual behaviours, and others. Two of the most commonly used transportation modes for event attendees are the aeroplane and the train. Of course, the use of the one does not exclude the use of the other for the same trip.

9 August 2021

Dr Richard Skaer dedicated much of his career to the success of The Company of Biologists. It is with great sadness that we learned of his passing on 5 June 2021.