I do like the fact that the last two conferences I've attended have featured plenary talks from government ministers (Prof. Graça Carvalho at #EMBOclimateResilience in Lisbon, and Lord Patrick Vallance at #Metascience2025 in London). We need more of this!
🌍🌱 Happy #EarthDay! Day 3 at our @embo.org Workshop "Cell Biology for Climate Resilience" featured vibrant roundtables & World Café discussions with scientists, funders & policymakers. Watch the highlights!
youtu.be/XhOQu3Q6JIA?... via @YouTube
#EMBOClimateResilience #EMBOCells4PlanetHealth
🌍🌱 Happy #EarthDay! Day 3 at our @embo.org Workshop "Cell Biology for Climate Resilience" featured vibrant roundtables & World Café discussions with scientists, funders & policymakers. Watch the highlights!
youtu.be/XhOQu3Q6JIA?... via @YouTube
#EMBOClimateResilience #EMBOCells4PlanetHealth
📣On climate, health, science and equity. Grateful Sir @JeremyFarrar (Chief Scientist, @who.int) joined @embo.org workshop. His plenary was powerful — we captured this short interview so his insights can travel far beyond. Do share! #EMBOcells4PlanetHealth #EMBOClimateresilience youtu.be/sDr-CT35GBA
Pride of place for my #EMBOclimateresilience badge back in the lab - this was a special one. We have much to share with you over the coming weeks!
www.youtube.com/@Cells4Plane...
@monicabettencourt.bsky.social
@gladfelterlab.bsky.social
@samreckpeterson.bsky.social
See all the fun happening at the second day of #EMBOcells4planethealth #EMBOclimateresilience @embo.org youtu.be/Gy3pWoBiu6I.
We have been very active in our meeting #EMBOcells4planethealth #EMBOclimateresilience @embo.org see what happened in the second day! Wonderful talks. youtu.be/Gy3pWoBiu6I
"The Ministry for the Future" has been the most mentioned book at #EMBOclimateResilience, but we have a real live minister here! Closing remarks from Prof. Grace Carvalho, Ministra do Ambiente e Energia (an academic engineer as well as a politician - perfect!).
#EMBOclimateResilience welcomes @ronmilo.bsky.social to Bluesky!
Another neat factoid at #EMBOclimateResilience, this time form @abbasz.bsky.social: "Global healthcare, if it were a country (Healthcareistan) would be the 5th greatest carbon emitter."
Top: the global biomass distribution of the mammalian class, represented by a Voronoi diagram. The area of each cell is proportional to the biomass contribution of each group. The global mammalian biomass distribution is dominated by humans and domesticated mammals, including livestock and pets (illustrated at the species level in SI Appendix). Bottom: enlarged view of the biomass of wild terrestrial (Left, grouped by order) and marine mammals (Right, grouped by family, or few families).
Here's one of the incredible dataviz images that Ron Milo just showed at #EMBOclimateResilience, from the excellent Greenspan et al PNAS paper www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....
How economically feasible is microbial carbon fixation using H2 from renewable energy and CO2 from air capture or flue gas? Ron Milo's back-of-the-envelope price is ~$2/kg. So feasible for high cost food and chemicals, not for staple foods or fuel. #EMBOclimateResilience
One of several shocking (traumatic?) slides shown by Ron Milo in the first minute of his talk at #EMBOclimateResilience
Eric Danquah (U of Ghana) looking at engineering African food crops for improved properties, including bambara groundnuts, pigeon peas, taro, etc. #EMBOclimateResilience [N.B. I have eaten bambara beans, and can confirm that they are "flatus-causing," a property that Eric proposes to correct!]
Aiptasia, an anemone as lab-rat proxy for corals (can do symbiosis, bleaching, RNAi, CRISPR, transgenics). But @pcleves.bsky.social now inducing coral spawning in the lab (identifying genes involved in heat stress, symbiosis, etc.) using Galaxea fascicularis #EMBOclimateResilience
From science... to art. Visual artist @dianapolicarpo.bsky.social talking to #EMBOclimateResilience about her exploration of extreme environments, ciguatoxins, lab collaborations, space and the oceans.
It’s been a very inspirational #EMBOclimateResilience workshop so far. I’m looking forward to the table discussions starting tomorrow. Here are some fancy highlights from the opening night 🧪🍿
See the best of the 1st day of #EMBOcells4planethealth #EMBOClimateResilience youtu.be/KFRFSPHdjFM?..., amazing people and very inspiring discussions!! @embo.org. We will be posting interviews so that you can actually follow some of what is happening!!
Follow some of the amazing discussions happening at our meeting!! Here you can have a glimpse of the first day!
youtu.be/KFRFSPHdjFM?... #EMBOcells4planethealth #EMBOclimateresilience @embo.org We will be posting more interviews and discussions from this great meeting.
@embl.org crew at @embo.org workshop on #EMBOClimateResilience
After a day of intense talks, now comes the active brainstorming part to actually come up with concrete steps forward to create more bonds between cell biology and planetary science.
Good talk from @sorayazwahlen.bsky.social - how do xenic vs axenic diatoms cope with a panel of pesticides? Sees a spectacular rescue of diatom death by the microbiome (now identifying the bacterial species and breakdown products). #EMBOclimateResilience
Samuel Lovat #EMBOclimateResilience: "We cannot continue to produce food the way that we do." Economic/impact sanity check on proposed solutions - #VerticalFarming? Nope: electricity costs alone challenge sustainability.
“No Water, no Life. No Blue, no Green.”💙💚 @floravincent.bsky.social from @embl.org revealing the beauty of diatom symbiotic interactions, which enable these globally important phytoplankton to adapt to environmental stresses and pollutants.
Such cool science here at #EMBOclimateResilience 🧪🌊🌍
Tomer Antman uses machine learning scrutiny of >1000 metagenomic tetranucleotide sequences to infer temperature of sample (gives R^2=0.82). Finds that marine & soil microbial GC content have opposite relationship to temperature, even when correcting for taxa. #EMBOclimateResilience
For those who want to know more about the Tara expeditions, name-checked by @floravincent.bsky.social at #EMBOclimateResilience, here are two articles about Tara Oceans and Tara Pacific in @plosbiology.org: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
Two other points of interest from @floravincent.bsky.social's #EMBOclimateResilience talk... a) Bringing the lab to the field - cool "lab vans" (EMBL TREC project). b) Vindication of the Tara project, once viewed with scepticism, and now seen as a massive resource for the marine micro field.
Great talk from @floravincent.bsky.social - working on Chaetoceros diatoms' symbiosis with bacteria (needed for survival in challenging environments) and ciliates - complex
interface between diatoms & ciliates revealed by cryoEM (ciliate rapidly creates a glue) #EMBOclimateResilience
Really nice work from Katelyn Sageman-Furnas (@luciastrader.bsky.social lab) - she used 230 Arabidopsis accessions to do GWAS on biomass plasticity in response to eCO2 (400 ppm versus a dystopian 800 ppm), getting some very unexpected hits. #EMBOclimateResilience
"Plants are master integrators of environmental cues." @luciastrader.bsky.social at #EMBOclimateResilience All cues & outcomes are funneled via auxin – how? Cellular responses are regulated by protein condensates, and many process probably integrate temperature info via effects on condensation.
Cool system of the day (so far...) at #EMBOclimateResilience: Bryopsis, a giant unicellular seaweed, >10 cm long. Gohta Goshima found that a bacterium (Ruegeria sp.) is essential for growth & development. So we need to check effect of climate change on bacterium as well as seaweed...
