The EMBO podcast EMBO

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 preprint was reviewed through Review Commons and published this year in The EMBO Journal. We also speak with Karin Dumstrei, who handled the manuscript at Review Commons, about the editor’s role in managing the peer review process. It is the story of a weird band on a western blot, pandemic disruptions, and the importance of tone in peer review.

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 genetics of viral spread in vertebrate hosts, to the biology of spillover events, to the tiny arms-races between bacteria and phage. Chang is a part of the EMBO Global Investigator Network; both Dudas and Tamman were awarded EMBO Installation Grants this year to help establish and grow their laboratories.

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, where he discusses his research – and science policy, preprints, peer review and Open Science. He and Oded Rechavi recently wrote a commentary that sparked an online debate on the thorny topic of recognizing author contributions. Together with EMBO Press’ Thomas Lemberger, we discussed his career, preprints, peer review, artificial intelligence, and more (including a Czech science fiction reading list).

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 Open Science world. Thomas Lemberger, Open Science implementation at EMBO, speaks about the past and future of Open Access and Open Science at EMBO Press. University of São Paulo biochemist Alicia Kowaltowski talks about some of the consequences of Open Access and how to tackle them.

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. Cori Bargmann has been an Associate EMBO Member since 2011. On this episode of the EMBO podcast we discussed the evolution of behavior, open science, a worm’s sense of smell, the Human Brain Initiative, mentorship, and much more.

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 Initiative. Quake came to biology after undergraduate and graduate work in physics and mathematics, and his research group at Stanford has maintained a strong technological and quantitative focus. On this episode of the EMBO podcast, we discussed what a cell type is, Open Science and preprints (Quake and student Michael Swift are currently experimenting with Review Commons – “the jury’s still out,” he says), the role of funders, how to start a company, and much more.