Máté Varga

Folks, it is finally out! Our paper on T2T assemblies of the zebrafish genome is on BioRxiv:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Image of Professor George Streisinger in his lab at the University of Oregon. He is standing in front of several fish tanks with lots of cables and heaters plugged in. Credit/Permissions to Mate Varga in https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/zeb.2017.1531

#ZebrafishFunFacts: In a 2016 article titled, "The Doctor of Delayed Publications - The remarkable life of George Streisinger", @mvargam.bsky.social takes the reader down memory lane to provide a life history of the Founding Father of #zebrafish research.

🔗 thenode.biologists.com/doctor-delay... 🧪

Characterization by in vitro complementation of a peptide corresponding to an operator-proximal segment of the beta-galactosidase structural gene of Escherichia coli - PubMed Characterization by in vitro complementation of a peptide corresponding to an operator-proximal segment of the beta-galactosidase structural gene of Escherichia coli

And in case you wonder, why should you know about her: if you ever did a “blue-white” screen, you are taking advantage of the principle of α-complementation that she has discovered in Monod’s lab: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5339877/

A Fortunate Journey on Uneven Grounds I was surprised to be invited to write a prefatory chapter for the Annual Review of Microbiology. Indeed, I did not feel that I belonged to that class of eminent scientists who had written such chapte...

1956 was also the moment when Ágnes Ullmann decided to leave Hungary - it would be another four years until she was able to manage to escape, under conditions that are just surreal, with the help of Jacques Monod - see Sean B. Carrol’s ‘Brave Genius’ or this: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...)

The Doctor of Delayed Publications - the remarkable life of George Streisinger - the Node It seemed like an ordinary morning, with the lecture on Drosophila genetics due to start at 8 o’clock. But when the professor walked in something

Emigrant Hungarians had an unexpected effect not only on the history of physics (Szilárd, Wiegner and Teller) but also on model organism biology: see also George Streisinger, whose family fled Hungary some 18 years earlier: thenode.biologists.com/doctor-delay...

We used to have the iGluSnFR line, but not anymore (I think we got them originally from Champalimaud). Also, we have UAS:GCaMP5, I believe, and perhaps also UAS:GCaMP7, but in both cases crossed with some specific drivers. If you need, I can check next week.

It is a fantastically well written plea to fund basic sciences. Money quote: "We are currently burning through a stockpile of knowledge accumulated during a more enlightened era of public investment, while allocating insufficient resources for replenishing it."

The figures from this book are all freely available through
@figshare.com, hopefully helpful for presentations and teaching:

figshare.com/projects/Epi...

Please let me know if you find any inaccuracies and I'll fix them. I've already updated one of the figures.

#EpigeneticsBook

Reaffirming the value of model organisms in training scientific minds - Nature Cell Biology As biomedical research prioritizes human models and translational promise, classic model organisms are increasingly dismissed. Here we argue that they have a lasting value, both in enabling discovery and in cultivating scientific thinking, by training researchers in systems reasoning, integrative thinking and independent inquiry.

PREACH!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very sad news, John Gurdon has died.

A developmental biologist's developmental biologist, Nobel prize winner

His work is the foundation of much of today's dev & stem cell bio.

An inspiration to many, including me. Always asking questions & wanting the answers

www.magd.cam.ac.uk/news/profess...

Jane Goodall, Eminent Primatologist Who Chronicled the Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91

Sad news: Jane Goodall has died. She did more than any other human for our understanding and appreciation of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees.

That chimpanzees are Endangered tells you everything about our species and about what made her so exceptional.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/o...

Ernst Haeckel's dumbbells from the Haeckel House in Jena.

Share your favorite black and white movie.

Within-family heritability estimates for behavioural and disease phenotypes from 500,000 sibling pairs of diverse ancestries Quantification of the direct effect of genetic variation on human behavioural traits is important for understanding between-individual variation in socio-economic and health outcomes but estimates of ...

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

With the caveat productivity is defined as the number of papers published, it's notable to see that the gender and English proficiency gaps are about the same overall. Then the gender gap decreases along the career, while the English proficiency gap widens

David Baltimore, Nobel-Winning Molecular Biologist, Dies at 87

A giant in molecular biology and virology has passed. RIP David Baltimore.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/s...

Wow, that was amazing! We thank everyone for attending the V4SDB 2025 meeting! You all made it an excellent conference, where we had the opportunity to hear from outstanding speakers,share ideas and experiences, and of course have some unforgettable time during social activities!

Next we look forward to hearing from Máté Varga @mvargam.bsky.social from ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, who will tell us about the Evolution and Development of Breathing Strategies in Paradise Fish!
#V4SDB2025 #developmentalbiology #evodevo

Summit picture of the ELTE Fishgenetics group at Slavkovský štít in the Tatra mountains.

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).

Just realized that I have not moved over the lab’s yearly hike thread to Bluesky yet :-/. So previously (somewhere on X) we had summit photos for: Triglav 🇸🇮 (2864 m) in 2019, Säuleck 🇦🇹 (3086 m) in 2021, Kôprovský štít 🇸🇰 (2367 m) in 2022, Ankogel 🇦🇹 (3254 m) in 2023 and Mangart 🇸🇮 (2679) last year.

Some of our colleagues arrived yesterday to attend the amazing two-day Young Developmental Biologist Workshop, a Round table on the use of Artificial Intelligence in research, and of course some social networking!

#V4SDB2025 #conference #developmentalbiology #evodevo #morphogenesis #organoids

Spider chart representation showing differences in zebrafish and paradise fish behavior. Zebrafish score higher in the domains of social preference and response to anxiolytic agents, whereas paradise fish show superior novelty exploration, working memory and behavioral consistency.

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

Making a long story short: whereas zebrafish are happy with their buddies in the shoal, paradise fish are loners, who do not care (much) about the presence of their conspecifics. This makes them a more reliable test subject when tested alone in different behavioral paradigms, and during exploration.

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...

A selection of covers from early (1951-1953) Decca classical long-playing records designed by the legendary graphic artist Erik Nitsche. (1/4)

Infographic paradise from Hungarian magazine Tudomány és Technika (Science and Technique) The youth educational magazine Tudomány és Technika (Science and Technique) was published biweekly in Hungarian between 1954 and 1963, but in Czechoslovakia, in Bratislava.

Well, let's give it a try.

📢The full programme for the @v4sdb.bsky.social Meeting 2025 is now online! Check out the exciting line-up, including selected short talks and flash talks.
v4sdb2025.img.cas.cz/programme/
See you in 25 days in 🇸🇰⛰️!
#developmentalbiology #evodevo #conference

Plus, the “Barkley Marathon” included a canoe trip to the other side of the river, and, of course, to become a #Finisher (we had 5), you needed to bring the pages back FIVE times. But everyone knows that, right? It’s #Barkley! 😉

#TCTeAC #theconferencetoendallconferences

Infographic paradise from the youth magazine Tudomány és Technika (Science and Technique) published in Hungarian but in Slovakia, Bratislava between 1954 and 1963. And this is just a "small" selection! 1. source adt.arcanum.com/hu/collectio...