The Allied Genetics Conference was an experiment for the GSA. We brought together under one roof seven separate research community meetings: C. elegans, ciliate, Drosophila, mouse, yeast, zebrafish, and population, evolutionary, and quantitative genetics.

Today we are launching another experiment, this time, to communicate results presented at the meeting. Thanks to a generous grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we have published a meeting report in G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics and have posted more than 280 presentations from TAGC on our YouTube channel.

Browse TAGC videos

The videos include audio and slides from each presentation and are freely available to the public. To help you navigate all this genetics, GSA created an easy-to-use website for browsing the videos. You can search for presenters or keywords, and filter by community, theme, and/or session title. Abstracts are also linked to each video, to give you easy access to further details, including author names and affiliations.

Read the TAGC meeting report

The report in G3 includes highlights from each community meeting, contributed by the program committees, plus comprehensive summaries of a selection of joint plenary and other keynote sessions. We are grateful for the hard work of the organizers and presenters in putting together this important record of the meeting.

We hope you enjoy exploring and sharing these new resources!

If you have any questions, or if you believe your video has been incorrectly included or omitted, please contact Cristy Gelling: cgelling@thegsajournals.org.

The Allied Genetics Conference was a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. Many talks given throughout the meeting featured compelling images and videos that generated a lot of buzz in various communities. Here, Genes to Genomes is excited to highlight just a few of the wonderful scientific images shared at #TAGC16.

Fly
Chris Large, Nitin Phadnis

“Mechanism of hybrid incompatibility between two subspecies of Drosophila pseudoobscura.” [D118]

Drosophila melanogaster ovaries. Natively-tagged Overdrive is in magenta, F-actin is in yellow, and DNA is in cyan.

Drosophila melanogaster testis. Natively-tagged Overdrive is in magenta, histones are in yellow, and DNA is in cyan.

Firefly
Sarah Sander

“Molecular variation across populations of a widespread North American firefly reveals selection on luciferase but not opsins.” [P335]

Gathering of Souls (2014) by Radim Schreiber. Sander’s crowd-funded project to explore the firefly genome can be found here.

Worm
Daehan Lee, Junho Lee

“QTL mapping for hitchhiking behavior in C. elegans reveals evolutionary trade-off between dispersal and reproduction.” [P377]

A single Caenorhabditis larva displays “nictation.” This behavior – a sort of “dance” to help the worm hitchhike – helps worms disperse to new locations by grabbing rides on other organisms.

A worm “hitchhikes” on a bug.

Yeast
Allison Hall, Mark Rose

“The CWI Pathway Regulates Cell Wall Degradation during Mating.” [Y495]

A yeast MID2 deletion strain (mid2Δ) responding to pheromone. Pheromone-induced morphogenesis causes cell lysis and cell wall degradation.

Loss of cytoplasmic GFP occurs concurrently with cell wall degradation and cell lysis (above).

Zebrafish
Leonard Zon

“Translating Zebrafish Development to the Clinic.” [Genetics and Determinants of Health Joint Plenary Session]

Melanoma initiation at the single-cell level as viewed in zebrafish melanocytes. See an illustration of the process here.

Arabidopsis
Wolfgang Busch

“Allelic variation of an EXOCYST subunit switches between distinct root system architectures.” [P375]

Variations in genotype cause distinct differences in root system architecture in Arabidopsis thaliana. Time-course depicting development of 5 Arabidopsis strains over the first 16 days after germination. Movie by Daniela Ristova and Wolfgang Busch. More on natural genetic and phenotypic variation of roots can be found on the Busch lab website.

Mouse
Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis

“Single cells get together: cell lineage specification & tissue morphogenesis in the early mouse embryo.” [M304, Rosa Beddington Lecture on Stem Cells]

Blastocyst stage mouse embryo with 3 cell lineages colored.

The midline in an E8.0 mouse embryo visualized at the single cell level. Extra-embryonic cells are in green.

#TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida.

One of the earliest events in development is the switch to self sufficiency. Soon after an egg is fertilized, the new individual must activate its genome and cease relying on maternally-provided RNA, a change known as the maternal-to-zygotic transition. Epigenetic reprogramming is central to this process; epigenetic marks, including DNA methylation and histone modifications, must be completely remodeled for the zygotic genome to begin expressing its own RNA. In her presentation at TAGC, Jadiel Wasson from the Katz lab at Emory University described what happens when some of that epigenetic machinery is missing.

Wasson studies a demethylase called KDM1A that removes the H3K4me2 epigenetic mark from histones; this mark is thought to be a “memory mark” that helps daughter cells know what genes to transcribe. She and her colleagues showed that KDM1A is expressed in oocytes and in early embryos. To determine its function in development, they deleted KDM1A in mouse oocytes, meaning it was missing when the zygote was fertilized; this was lethal. They performed crosses where the male had normal KDM1A, but the female lost KDM1A in the germline. Embryos from these crosses failed to undergo the maternal-to-zygotic transition and did not survive.

Wasson then deleted KDM1A in the female germline in a way that resulted in embryos with only a partial loss of KDM1A function. The majority of these mice died during embryogenesis, but a few survived to adulthood. These animals displayed extreme obsessive-compulsive tendencies as measured by a marble burying assay; in fact, they displayed more severe obsessive-compulsive behavior than an established mouse model of OCD (see Shmelkov 2010). This provides a striking case of altered epigenetic programming at fertilization that leads to a behavioral phenotype weeks later.

Control mouse in the marble burying assay

Mutant mouse in the marble burying assay

Top: marbles before assay; Middle: marbles after control mouse; Bottom: marbles after mutant mouse

Development (M): Development and Morphogenesis.
M270 Wasson: KDM1A required for maternal-to-zygotic transition and proper genome reprogramming after fertilization

CITATIONS

Shmelkov, S.V., Hormigo, A., Jing, D., Proenca, C.C., Bath, K.G., Milde, T., Shmelkov, E., Kushner, J.S., Baljevic, M., Dincheva, I., Murphy, A.J., Valenzuela, D.M., Gale, N.W., Yancopoulos, G.D., Ninan, I., Rafii, F.S.L.S. 2010. Slitrk5 deficiency impairs corticostriatal circuitry and leads to obsessive-compulsive–like behaviors in mice. Nat Med, 16:598-602. doi: 10.1038/nm.2125 http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v16/n5/full/nm.2125.html

Wasson, J.A., Simon, A.K., Myrick, D.A. Wolf, G., Driscoll, S., Pfaff, S.L., Macfarlan, T.S., Katz, D.J. 2016. Maternally provided LSD1/KDM1A enables the maternal-to-zygotic transition and prevents defects that manifest postnatally. eLife, 5e:08848. doi: 10.7554/eLife.08848 https://elifesciences.org/content/5/e08848

The recent Brexit vote may initiate a break up of the European Union and a split in the United Kingdom. Violence and war is tearing apart the Middle East. Racial tensions are flaring up in the U.S. But in Florida two weeks ago, 3,000 model organism geneticists proved that separate communities not only can co-exist but can join together to exchange hard-won wisdoms and forge new collaborations.

Now, you may think it fatuous of me to compare two soldiers on opposite sides of a sectarian battle to two grad students training in such polarized and bellicose environments as a worm lab and a fly lab. But much human behavior derives from our sense of who is part of an in-group vs. an out-group, and our consequent activities to protect those we include among our close kin. This insularity extends even to science. So when members of seven different model system communities came to the GSA-sponsored TAGC meeting to roam the vast halls of a conference center cooled to hibernation-inducing temperature, they provided a lesson in cooperativity that politicians and ordinary citizens could learn from.

TAGC featured the best our field has to offer. We saw blood stem cells cuddled by endothelial cells and body slammed by macrophages; we watched sleep-deprived fruitflies struggling to mate; we learned evolutionary principles that drive new structures in stickleback fish; we came to appreciate that differences between microbiomes could help explain healthy vs. unhealthy outcomes in newborns with limited access to food; and we marveled at the synthesis of complete yeast chromosomes missing their tRNAs and transposons but gaining a bunch of recombination sites in compensation.

In recent years the GSA has sponsored meetings for the individual model organism communities. Each has it own myriad preferences, such as when to hold the meeting; what type of venue to use; how many sessions to include; when to have the poster sessions; and how to integrate the workshops into the program. Thus, a combined meeting like TAGC takes a lot of heavy lifting to arrive at a series of compromises acceptable to everyone. Because even the plenary talks – a highlight of the meeting – take away from the time available for community-specific events, deciding the number and content of the plenary sessions can be the United Nations-lite. But TAGC was not a zero sum game: every community ended up a winner.

Another example of how combined community support had impact far greater than any single community could muster centers on the Model Organism Databases. The NIH has advanced a plan to integrate several of these into a single database, accompanied by a 30% reduction in funding for each. While the idea to integrate is sensible, necessary and long overdue, concerns have arisen as to whether essential organism-specific information would be maintained as the integration moved forward.

A statement of support initiated by the Drosophila community, spearheaded by David Bilder at Berkeley, quickly drew other model organism leaders to come together to draft a final version. The GSA hosted the statement and collected signatures. In short order, it had support from 12 Nobel laureates, 60 members of the National Academy of Sciences and more than 11,000 signers from 85 countries around the world.

The statement did not go unnoticed. NIH director Francis Collins mentioned it in his talk at TAGC and met with a group of community and database leaders at the conference. A meeting at the NIH to refine the database proposal is in the works for later this year. The statement has helped ensure that the model organism communities will weigh in on the process.

The GSA is a relatively small organization, but we have a passionate membership that includes many grad students, postdocs and faculty dedicated to the Society. We rely on their energy and volunteer spirit to make sure that initiatives like TAGC and the database statement of support are successful. In a time when our political discourse often features pronouncements of divisiveness and exclusion, when significance is measured by the number of one’s Twitter followers, and when public figures a few basepairs short of a full helix may seem predominant, it’s good to see geneticists acting as a unified group.

The Allied Genetics Conference brought seven genetics research communities together in Orlando to share great science and make new scientific connections. Watch the video below to see a few highlights from the meeting.