May 2025

Sunny and warm - time for an ice cream in Weston Park

Tanya's chapter on development of the semicircular canals, otoliths and otoconia is now out in Current Topics in Developmental Biology: Development of the Senses, eds. Guy Richardson and Doris Wu.  Free to download until July:  https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1l8PbFzn7WIEK

An image from the lab is currently on display in the wonderful exhibition 'Anatomy at Sheffield: from scalpel to virtual dissection and beyond’, curated by Daniela Cacciabue, in collaboration with the University Library.  The opening event on 2nd May included a fascinating and entertaining talk on the cochlea by Professor Matthew Mason (University of Cambridge). 

The developing inner ear in a live two-day-old zebrafish embryo.  Sensory hair cells are highlighted with Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP).  Image taken by Dr Esther Maier; transgenic line originally from the Baier lab.

April 2025

Tanya gave a talk on epithelial morphogenesis in the zebrafish inner ear at the European Zebrafish Principal Investigators' meeting, held at the Institut du Cerveau in Paris, France.

March 2025

Aaron, Haseeb and Sarah presented posters at the fabulous Biologists @100 meeting in Liverpool, celebrating 100 years of the Company of Biologists.  The venue was the Area and Convention Centre (ACC) Liverpool, located on the former King's Dock, with spectacular views across the Mersey.  It was great to catch up with former lab member Kate Hammond, now Director of the BSc Genetics degree programme at the University of Liverpool.

King Yee Cheung visited from Singapore, and popped into the lab to help complete revisions on our collaborative manuscript on zebrafish olfactory ionocytes.  King has recently started postdoctoral work in the lab of Adam Claridge-Chang at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.

January–February 2025

Tanya paid a visit to the lab of Berta Alsina at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, to act as external examiner for one of Berta's PhD students, who gave an excellent talk and thesis defence.  It was great to catch up with Berta and the other members of the thesis committee, Alejandro Barallo Gimeno and David Raible.  Later we were joined by Cristina Pujades to explore the beautiful Catalan countryside and coastline.

December 2024

The C21 Labs enjoyed a Christmas meal and white elephant gift exchange at the Norfolk Arms in Ringinglow.

🎄Happy Holidays!🎄

November 2024

Our collaborative manuscript on zebrafish olfactory ionocytes is now posted as a preprint on bioRxiv, with King Yee as joint first author.  The work is a collaboration with the Jesuthasan and Piotrowski labs, and uses datasets from the Jain, Lichtman and Engert groups.

Haseeb and Tanya both presented talks at the one-day BSDB Autumn Meeting Mechanisms of Septation Tissue Fusion in Development and Disease at King's College London, organised by Joe Rainger and Jeremy Green.

Haseeb also presented a talk of his computational image analysis work at the Royal Microscopy Society Meeting Frontiers in Bioimaging, held in Oxford.

Nick attended the PicoQuant 20th International Course Principles and Applications of Time-resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy in Berlin, Germany.

Nicole presented a poster of her summer research project, supervised by Haseeb, at the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Showcase at The Octagon.  The Showcase is an annual exhibition and celebration of all the research completed by SURE students over the previous summer.

Tanya visited the Living Systems Institute, University of Exeter, as external examiner for Gemma Sutton, who defended an excellent PhD thesis.  The following day Tanya gave a seminar, hosted by Professor Steffen Scholpp, and spent the day discussing science with friends and colleagues.

Tanya, Sarah and Nahal ran a successful MSc practical, teaching students how to design and microinject CRISPR reagents into zebrafish embryos, and analyse the results by PCR and restriction digest.

October 2024

Nahal presented a poster of her PhD work at the 17th Zebrafish Disease Models Conference (ZDM17) in Lisbon, Portugal.  Nahal's attendance at the conference was funded by a Company of Biologists Travel Grant.  The poster generated lots of discussion and was a great catalyst to meet with other PhD students using similar techniques in their work.