The presentation will start at 10:00 in the MPI-CBG auditorium. Ask your questions: What is it like to be a scientist? Can you do research and have a family? Afterwards, there will be tours through the building: See zebrafish, worms, and fruit flies, have a look at the labs and see how people work!

Girls’ Day, an initiative of the Federal Ministries for Education and Research (BMBF), and for Family Affairs, the Elderly, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ), was designed to motivate and encourage particularly girls to seize their career options and to decide in favour of a qualified vocational training or degree. Subsequently, they choose an occupation even in professional fields that are presently not typically female.

"Singing Self-Organisation" will be the world premiere of such a kind of experiment on 3 February 2012 at 19:00 at the ALTANA Galerie (Helmholtzstraße 9, Dresden). It is the finissage event which officially closes the exhibition "terra incognita".

Sound artist Ulrike Sowodniok from Berlin and Grit Ruhland from Dresden have developed the project together with the ALTANA Galerie Dresden and the MPI-CBG. You do not need any skills to be part of the experiment - just be open.

Come and become part of the crowd!

There are three more live performances that night: „Paradies!“, „A Lifetime“ and a music performance by composer Frieder Zimmermann. Seize this last chance to see 50 exhibits of contemporary art, experiments, and installations.

All lectures are in German and will be held from 14:30–15:30 in the MPI-CBG Auditorium on the dates listed below.

Everybody is welcome!

17 April 2012
Vineeth Surendranath
Knack’ die Nuss! – Ein interaktiver Vortrag

15 May 2012
Dr. Katja Kapp
Zellkompartimente – Wie Proteine in unterschiedliche Zellregionen kommen

12 June 2012
Dr. Helena Jambor
Die unsterbliche Zelle: Entwicklung der Keimbahnzellen

14 August 2012
Vineeth Surendranath
Ein Leben als Wissenschaftler – Mythen und Wahrheiten

Researchers at the MPI-CBG in Dresden now established a new technique: They microinjected neural stem and progenitor cells in organotypic slice culture of embryonic mouse brain. These cells behaved like cells in their natural environment. Microinjection of single genes, recombinant proteins or complex mixtures of RNA was found to elicit acute and defined changes in the behavior and progeny fate of these cells. Thus, apical progenitor microinjection provides a new approach to acutely manipulating single neural stem and progenitor cells in tissue.

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Picture: Developing mouse brain (left) and a microinjection pipette (right). The bright "cloud" is a fluorescent dye. copyright: MPI-CBG Dresden

In the DIPP School project, multinational teams of PhD students offer a two hour-workshop with experiments run in English at Dresden schools. After that, the PhD students are available for discussion on career models and on life in Dresden as a foreigner. The sad starting point of the project was the murder of Marwa El-Sherbini in 2009 – the school project that teaches tolerance through science to young people was the response of some Dresden PhD students to that tragic event.

“Amongst the students it became apparent that we – the scientific community with its strong dependence on international collaborations – could and should contribute to transforming the city into a more tolerant environment. We wanted to demonstrate that open-mindedness and curiosity are key for success in science and in society. It is the ideas of people that count, and not where they are from nor how they look like”, says Marcus Jahnel, PhD student from Germany at the MPI-CBG and one of the initiators of the program. The students, however, really make an effort not to preach, but to teach: “We think that children need positive role models of tolerance and success”.

Avinash Chekuru from India joined this project because he likes teaching and interacting with society. “Moreover, motivating young scientists is an important aspect – I didn't experience this when I was in school”, he says. Anja Glenk (Germany) likes the grass roots involvement of the project: “The project came from the basis – we didn't talk much about organizing something, we just did it. It is still organized in a very informal way – but it works.” Portuguese researcher Vanessa Carlos adds: “Joining this project was an opportunity for me to give an example of tolerance, respect and show how fun it is to work in a multicultural environment.” All experiments are performed in English: “Trying to speak with young students the same language in all senses is a pleasant challenge”, explains Madina Karimova from Russia. “Having a common topic to talk about with pupils and young people can help to break the ice between us and local people, to let them see what we do and why are we here”. The project is also about fun: “It is great to inspire kids for science and to give them some insights into the crazy world that lies beyond their imagination”, says German PhD student Sebastian Dunst. This can also be a first detail to change things: “If we want things to change, we must get out of our cocoons and reach out to the community!” says Vanessa Carlos.

During the ceremony, Dick Marty, former president and member of the Commission on Human Rights at the Council of Europe, shared his views on human rights. American writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison highlighted the difficult balance between the promotion of human rights and those of women.

photo: J. Erard / Université de Genève

All lectures are in German and will be held from 14:30–15:30 in the MPI-CBG Auditorium on the dates listed below.

Everybody is welcome!

11 October 2011
Vineeth Surendranath: Ein Leben als Wissenschaftler – Mythen und Wahrheiten

8 November 2011
Robert Wieduwild: Gewebezüchtung (Tissue Engineering) und Unterstützung der natürlichen Regeneration des Körpers

13 December 2011
Kristin Franke: Epo – mehr als Doping

17 January 2012
Marta Luz: Von blinden Fischen und Fliegen – Über die Netzhautdegeneration

We offer a guide service for visually impaired and blind people.
Please contact Florian Frisch (MPI-CBG), 0351-210 2840

Programme

10:00 WELCOME
Prof. Dr. Gerd Kempermann (CRTD and DZNE)
Franz Badura (PRO RETINA Deutschland e.V.)

10:30 Dr. Caren NORDEN (MPI-CBG)
Netzhautentwicklung verstehen: Was wir von Fischen lernen können

11:00 Prof. Dr. Richard Funk (TU Dresden)
Degenerative Netzhauterkrankungen - Grundlagen der Entstehung

11:30 Dr. Marius Ader (CRTD)
Gen- und Zelltherapie: Neue Möglichkeiten zur Behandlung von Netzhauterkrankungen?

12:00 LUNCH BREAK

13:00 Dr. Dirk Sandner (UKD)
Typische Erkrankungen der Netzhaut und ihre modernen Therapieoptionen

13:30 Prof. Dr. Triantafyllos Chavakis (UKD)
Klinische und experimentelle Aspekte der diabetischen Retinopathie

Cell polarity is a term used to describe a number of cellular pathways that allow cells to orient along a geometric axis. A key step in this process is the segregation of two groups of highly conserved PAR polarity proteins, first discovered in the nematode C. elegans, into two complementary membrane-associated domains. The domains mark the anterior and posterior halves of the cell and the different PAR proteins within these two domains spatially regulate a series of downstream pathways that reorganize the cell along this axis. As it turns out, the same basic polarity machinery that underlies polarity in the early embryo, also governs developmental processes through higher animals, including tissue architecture in the intestine, skin, and brain, and the regulation of cell fate decisions such as whether stem cells proliferate or differentiate. Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, defects in polarity are associated with severe developmental defects and cancer. (Science, 20 October 2011)

Stephan Grill is a wanderer between two Dresden Max Planck Institutes: He is located both at the one for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and the one for Physics of Complex Systems. Thus, his research projects always bring physics into biology - or the other way round. Recently, his team was interested in the biological phenomenon of how polarity emerges in an embryo - and moved beyond trying to understand the detailed molecular activities of proteins, and instead focused on the physics of the problem, taking into account PAR protein motion and the forces that PAR proteins experience as they move through the embryo.

Previous work had shown that two groups of PAR proteins, one "anterior" and one "posterior", were able to antagonize one another at the membrane, and that the initial segregation of PAR proteins was induced by the directed motion of a thin layer of a contractile actin meshwork that lies just under the cell membrane, which seemed to carry the "anterior" group of PAR proteins preferentially to the anterior of the cell, with the other group coming to occupy the "posterior." But how this all worked was really unclear.

The current studies revealed that this actin-based fluid flow is sufficient to cause the polarized segregation of PAR proteins simply by virtue of PAR proteins being entrained within this thin layer of fluid just beneath the membrane. This phenomenon, which is called advection, is the same process that governs the spread of particles in the ocean: "Like a message in a bottle being
carried across the ocean versus a drop of wine simply mixing into the water", says Nathan Goehring, postdoc at the MPI-CBG. Going back to polarity, these "currents" of actin flow essentially move sufficiently fast that they can overcome the diffusion of PAR proteins and transport them across the cell.

The second key question was why the segregation by flow results in the formation of two domains that persist once flows cease. One group of PAR proteins is initially on the membrane and keeps the other off. This pattern (or lack of pattern) is stable until flows start. Once the first group gets pushed to the anterior, the other can come onto the membrane in the posterior. Once both are on the membrane, the interactions maintain the new polarized pattern.

„We actually like this model a lot", says Nathan Goehring, "because it can, based on only a few simple ingredients and physical principles, explain quite a few of the key features of embryo polarization". There are a lot of answered questions, including how PAR proteins are able to associate with the membrane, or how they "talk" to each other in molecular terms. No problem for Goehring: "This open-ended nature of the polarity problem is actually quite good for a relatively young scientist such as myself".

Caption:
Polarity in a C. elegans embryo: PAR-6 (red) and PAR-2 (green) define the anterior and the posterior halves of the cell. copyright: MPI-CBG Dresden

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