Project Summary/Abstract
Since 1980, the Developmental Biology of the Sea Urchin and other Marine Invertebrates
(DBSUMI) Meeting has been held every 18 months. The Marine Biological Laboratory will host
the 26th conference in this series in April 2020, bringing together an international community
of researchers who use sea urchins and a wide variety of marine invertebrates as research
models, with the goal of fostering collaboration and resource sharing. The community focuses
broadly on cellular, developmental, and evolutionary biology questions and research, with an
emphasis on systems-level gene regulatory network tools and analyses. There are many different
marine animal models currently used in this research, including XXXX. The research being
done in these and other taxa now are revealing many fundamental processes relevant to human
health in the areas of development, regeneration, neurogenesis, toxicology, and tissue
homeostasis, which are not as accessible in canonical vertebrate and invertebrate model
systems. In this meeting, we will emphasize research using these aquatic models for critical
insights into the full range of human disease.
Information and collaborative exchange of ideas will be disseminated through a series of
plenary and concurrent speaker sessions as well as social events revolving around poster
sessions. To increase the meeting’s exposure? we are planning to publish the proceedings for
this meeting in a special issue of a scientific journal. We are making a dedicated effort to recruit
new investigators, women, investigators with disabilities and under-represented minorities. For
example, to make the meeting more of a forum for junior level scientists we will introduce
afternoon “lightning talks” for the first time to highlight each evening’s poster session and
scheduled lunchtime table “themes” focused on career training and data dissemination. We are
also creating the first pre-meeting workshop focused on relevant recently developed techniques
(e.g. genome editing, single cell RNAseq) that are critical for the marine invertebrate
community. Finally, we are generating a plenary session to provide investigators with ideas,
background, and mentoring required to improve the quality of grant applications submitted to
multiple NIH institutes.
