The EMBO podcast

1 December 2023 - Cells use a  transcriptional-translational regulatory loop  to maintain circadian rhythms. But  John O’Neill  and collaborators have shown that a cell can lose its nucleus and  still keep time . O’Neill and his postdoc Andrew Beale talked to us about how investigating a mysterious band on a western blot led to a new understanding of the red blood cell’s clockwork mechanism. Their...

30 October 2023 - As COVID-19 and flu season descends on the northern hemisphere, we talk with three new research group leaders who work, among other topics, on host-virus interactions:  Hsiao Han Chang  at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan,  Gytis Dudas  at Vilnius University in Lithuania, and  Hedvig Tamman  at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Their work ranges from the population geneti...

14 July 2023 - EMBO Member Pavel Tomancak is a senior research  group leader  at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. His lab investigates the evolution of gene regulatory networks and tissue morphogenesis. He recently became the Director of the  Central European Institute of Technology  in Brno, in the Czech Republic .  He is active on social media,...

EMBO announced that from 2024 on, all papers published in The EMBO Journal and EMBO Reports will be published Open Access and that freely accessible source data will be included in all EMBO Press journals. In this episode of the EMBO podcast, we discuss the new Open Access policy with Bernd Pulverer, Head of Scientific Publishing at EMBO. He also talks about the role of journals in a preprint and...

27 January 2023  - “I really think our special feature (as humans) is communication and shared knowledge,” neuroscientist Cori Bargmann told the EMBO podcast. Bargmann is the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at The Rockefeller University in New York, where her group studies neurobiology using C. elegans as their main model.&...

5 January 2023  - “Nobody is doubling the number of cell types,” says Steve Quake, “but what we have now is the full molecular portrait of those cell types”. Quake, who led a decade-long effort to create full organism molecular cell atlases, served for six years as co-President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. He succeeded neuroscientist Cori Bargmann as Head of Science for the  Chan Zuckerberg Init...

23 December 2022  - “It would be very surprising if you ever had a mechanism in nature that would be 100%. Biology never seems to be so clear cut.” That was  Roger Reddel ’s reaction to his then Ph. D. student  Tracy Bryan ’s discovery that many cancer cell lines do not express the enzyme telomerase, but still maintain long telomeres throughout the immortalization process. Their 199...

21 December 2022  - BMJ Open is an open-access medical journal with an open peer review process, which includes asking referees to sign their reviews. The journal is unusual in that it not only publishes peer-reviewed research, but it also runs its own experiments on new publication and review practices, complete with control groups and  publication in (other) scientific journals . Adrian Aldcroft...

14 November 2022 – EMBO Member Roberto di Lauro was a group leader at the EMBL, a professor at the University of Naples Federico II, served as President of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, and as the scientific attaché to the Italian Embassy in London. Di Lauro is currently retired from research, but he still works on science evaluation as a member of Italy's National Committee for Researc...

26 September 2022 - “In 1977, the world witnessed both the eradication of smallpox and the beginning of the modern age of genomics”. That’s the starting point for a recently published  EMBO Reports review  by Nash Rochman, Yuri Wolf, and  Eugene Koonin . The paper, entitled “Molecular adaptations during viral epidemics”, asks what we have learned from the seven major epide...

11 July 2022 - “We binned the data, which is one of my favorite things to do,” said cell biologist  Orian Shirihai , describing how careful observation and analysis transformed an inquiry into the regulation of insulin secretion into a groundbreaking description of the mitochondrial life cycle. The resulting portrait of what Shirihai refers to as “the social life of mitochondria within the ce...

6 May 2022 - The amazing advances in gene sequencing technology over the last two decades have not yet sparked the revolution in personalized cancer treatment that many had hoped for. Although there have been significant advances,  actionable mutations, those that can be targeted to improve patient survival or quality of life, remain rare. But there is also the option to leapfrog genomics entirely...

21 March 2022 - Fiona Watt has been recently appointed EMBO Director, taking over from Maria Leptin, who was inaugurated as the new president of the European Research Council in the fall of 2021. Fiona and Maria sat down to discuss science funding, what scientists get wrong about interacting with policymakers, the importance of failure, and much more. The conversation took place in Heidelberg, not...

3 March 2022 - In the November 1992 issue of The EMBO Journal, Tasuku Honjo and colleagues  reported the discovery of a new gene , which they named programmed death 1 (PD-1). Thirty years later, monoclonal antibodies against PD-1 were being used in the clinic to treat cancer patients, and in 2018 Tasuku Honjo shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Allison. “The paper has been...

16 February 2022 - The EMBO Young Investigator Programme (YIP) was created in 2002 to support researchers starting their first lab (to be eligible, “applicants must have been an independent group leader for at least one year and for less than four years”). The programme provides mentorship, training, and networking opportunities for both the PIs and their lab members. Applications for the YIP prog...

2 February 2022 - Cell biologist Prachee Avasthi has a longstanding interest in cilia, which she began studying in mammalian photoreceptor cells as a graduate student, before adopting the single-cell green alga  Chlamydomonas reinhardtii  as her model organism. Prachee was recently appointed Chief Scientific Officer of the newly created Arcadia Science, and she also serves as president of the non-...

3 January 2021 - “Mucosal immunity is likely the best strategy to go forward fighting this pandemic. It’s like placing the guard outside the door instead of inside the door,” immunologist Akiko Iwasaki told the EMBO podcast. Iwasaki has been studying how the immune system fights infections at the interfaces between the host and the environment ever since graduate school when she challenged the pre...

21 December 2021 - Researcher Fabrizio d'Adda di Fagagna and collaborators, including co-first authors Sara Sepe and Francesca Rossiello, have recently described in  EMBO Reports  a potential explanation for the increased susceptibility of the elderly to COVID-19. They reveal a link between damaged, shortened, or unprotected telomeres and the expression of the host molecul...

2 December 2021 - In this episode of the EMBO podcast, we spoke with Harmit Malik about his journey from chemical engineering to biology, books that inspire future scientists, and the importance of simply showing up. We discussed the Malik lab’s research on the genetic conflicts between centromeres, mobile genetic elements, retroviruses, and of course the host innate immune response – which his la...

19 November 2021 - In our last episode, outgoing EMBO Director Maria Leptin told us about her scientific research and the several unexpected turns in her career. In part 2, we spoke about her first papers, preprints,  journal-independent peer review , and the challenges of childcare for a new PI. We also talked to Michele Garfinkel, Head of the EMBO Policy Programme.

12 November 2021 - Maria Leptin became the fifth EMBO Director in January 2010. We spoke with Maria about how she became a scientist and her research in immunology and developmental biology. We also discussed initiatives to increase participation in EMBO Programmes across all EMBC Member States, and the unanswered scientific questions that she will leave behind as she winds down her laboratory act...

29 October 2021 - EMBO Member Adriano Aguzzi is the Director of the Institute of Neuropathology at the University of Zurich. The Aguzzi lab investigates the molecular basis of prion diseases and other neurodegenerative illnesses. We spoke with Adriano Aguzzi and  Review Commons  project leader Thomas Lemberger about preprints, peer review, paying for innovation in publishing, and an unexpected pos...

22 October 2021 - Pediatric infectious disease physician Ameneh Khatami, senior author Jonathan Iredell and their collaborators recently published in  EMBO Molecular Medicine  the story of a seven-year-old girl infected with a multi-drug resistant Pseudomonas strain. The team resorted to an experimental treatment with a long history, phage therapy. In this episode of the EMBO podcast, Khatami told...

13 October 2021 - Tel-Aviv University neuroscientist Oded Rechavi was elected an EMBO Member in 2021. We spoke with Oded about his lab’s work on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in worms, his forays into archeology and economics, and his life as a science social media star. 

6 October 2021 - In early July, science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt spoke with the co-founders of BioNTech Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin. Kai spoke with them about their journey from physician scientists to entrepreneurs and how BioNTech, a company with a strong focus on cancer developed the first approved Covid-19 vaccine in less than one year. Türeci and Sahin w...