For 2025 we went back to the high Tatra mountains - this was our second attempt for Slavkovský štít 🇸🇰 (2452 m) as the first one the previous day failed due to heavy rains.

We choose the Tatras so we can easily hop over to the @v4sdb.bsky.social conference in Stará Lesná (v4sdb2025.img.cas.cz).

Ummm... a better version of our summary figure, with alt text.

Better later than never, I guess - we are quite happy to see this paper out in @commsbio.nature.com. Spearheaded by my super talented colleague, Zoltán Varga, we have compared the behaviour of zebrafish and paradise fish larvae, which turned out to be quite different. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Quite happy to see this published: academic.oup.com/nargab/artic.... Fun fact: this seems to be only the third species-specific snoRNAome resource besides the fungal (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29196413/) and human ones (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27174936/).

... and with the genomes of many zebrafish strains available we could also show that this transposon is indeed very much active in the fish genome. 14/n

But as I was annotating the genome it also became obvious that the last exon of ctnnb2 was longer in the mutant genome than in the reference and a closer look showed that it is a CMC EnSpm-type transposon. Later we showed that this destabilizes the ctnnb2 transcript ... 13/n

In the end I also needed help from @burgesslab.bsky.social and @javanokendo.bsky.social to assemble the reads, and to my great surprise (and initial disappointment) there was no sign for chromosomal rearrangement. 12/n

Working with ichabod was great, and while we could not map the exact mutation we showed that it results in the reduction of maternal ctnnb2 transcripts. europepmc.org/article/MED/... 9/n

This is how I came across the first published paper on ichabod, by Eric Weinberg, and I can still remember reading it on mass transit and thinking about how cool this was. europepmc.org/article/MED/... 6/n

But before I allow nostalgia to take over this thread, just a scientific tldr version: we show that the insertion of a transposon into the 3’UTR of the zebrafish ctnnb2 gene destabilizes an otherwise very stable maternal transcript leading to a ventralized phenotype. 2/n

And with that the first ever @v4sdb.bsky.social Student Winter School came to the end. Thanks for all for coming, and you will be able to find all the course material on the website: danio-elte.github.io/2025V4SDBStu...

Final day of the @v4sdb.bsky.social Winter School was all about Bonsai - Adriana Nagy-Dabacan made a fantastic intro into using Bonsai to analyse behavior (danio-elte.github.io/2025V4SDBStu...).

Third day of the @v4sdb Winter School saw @isaacbianco.bsky.social talking about calcium imaging (danio-elte.github.io/2025V4SDBStu...) and @kenzoivanovitch.bsky.social teaching us how to handle lightsheet data (danio-elte.github.io/2025V4SDBStu...).

The second day of the @v4sdb.bsky.social WinterSchool started again with @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy and some nice CATMAID-based analysis of the Platynereis connectome, followed by @jwpylvanainen.bsky.social talking about TrackMate and CellTracksColab (danio-elte.github.io/2025V4SDBStu...).

Aaaand the 2025 @v4sdb.bsky.social Student Winter School is off. First day it was Gáspár Jékely @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy talking about the difficulties that the OpenSciene movement faces: it is a significant but not insurmountable climb.

If one has to point to a single figure that screams about the utter unsustainability of our current publishing model, imo is this one.

On the behalf of V4SDB I’m organizing a Student Winter School with focus on imaging data analysis (28-31.01.2025, Budapest). Our speakers include: @kenzoivanovitch.bsky.social, @jwpylvanainen.bsky.social, @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy. Interested? See below.