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 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.

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 1995 paper “Telomere elongation in immortal human cells without detectable telomerase activity” has been cited over seventeen hundred times. It is included in The EMBO Journal’s 40th-anniversary collection of ground-breaking articles, all free to read. On this episode, Reddel and Bryan discuss how the project began, the key experiments, and the consequences of Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres (ALT) for cancer research. Miguel Godinho Ferreira discusses the paper’s impact in the broader setting of genome instability and DNA repair.

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 Aldcroftfor this episode of the EMBO podcast joins Review Commons project leader Thomas Lemberger for a conversation about peer review, preprints, open science, and the role of editors in basic and clinical research.

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 Research Evaluation. We talked about molecular biology, the challenges of evaluating and funding different types of research, and the occasional uses of having a minister’s cell phone number.

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 epidemics that have emerged in the half-century in which we’ve had the molecular genetic and genomic tools to analyze the pathogens responsible for them. Co-authors Eugene Koonin and Nash Rochman discuss some of the lessons learned (and open questions) on this episode of the EMBO podcast. We also talked about virology, pandemics, and Rochman et al’s paper with veteran virologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University.

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 cell” was published in The EMBO Journal in 2008. The paper, “Fission and selective fusion govern mitochondrial segregation and elimination by autophagy”, has since received almost three thousand citations and is included in the journal’s 40th anniversary collection. Konstanze  Winklhofer discusses the paper’s enduring impact and the role of mitochondrial quality control in her field of neurodegenerative diseases.

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, or to complement it, by using proteomic approaches. You may be surprised to learn that, as the guests on this episode of our podcast, Ursula Klingmüller and Matthias Mann told us, clinical proteomics is already being explored to design personalized cancer treatment strategies. Klingmüller and Mann discussed the technological (read the Mann lab’s recent Molecular Systems Biology paper on single cell proteomics here), scientific, and clinical challenges of the field with Molecular Systems Biology Senior Scientific Editor Maria Polychronidou.

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 long after the start of the war in Ukraine, and we also talked about EMBO’s Solidarity List for displaced researchers.

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 transformational. I don’t think that they would ever have predicted that looking into genes that were differentially expressed that they would get such an important molecule that would be transformative for cancer immunotherapy,” said EMBO Journal Chief Editor Facundo Batista. In this episode of the EMBO podcast, Tasuku Honjo spoke about his journey from medical school to basic research, the importance of academic journals, and the many surprising turns in the PD-1 story. We also talked to Pierre Golstein, whose group cloned CTLA-4.

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 programme are currently open. The EMBO podcast spoke with a YIP alumnus, immunologist Matteo Iannacone, and a recently selected member of the programme, neuroscientist Katrin Franke.

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-profit science organization ASAPbio. ASAPbio is EMBO’s partner in the peer-reviewed preprint platform, Review Commons. Prachee and Review Commons project leader Thomas Lemberger joined the EMBO podcast for a discussion on open science, preprints, peer review, and the importance of community.

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 prevailing dogma about how DNA vaccines work. Her lab has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the pathophysiology of COVID-19, using patient samples and data, as well as developing new model systems. We discussed her research, some of the challenges of science communication during the pandemic, and her approach to teaching. Akiko Iwasaki was elected an EMBO Associate Member in 2021.

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 molecule highjacked by SARS-CoV-2 to infect cells, angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). d'Adda di Fagagna spoke with us about how the project emerged, its links to a DNA repair pathway discovered in his lab, and the potential therapeutic implications. Also in this episode, biologist João Passos discussed the significance of the study and EMBO Reports scientific editor Esther Schnapp explained why it was a good fit for the journal. 

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 lab studies in several different models, ranging from yeast to primates. Thomas Lemberger joined the conversation to talk to Harmit about peer review, preprints, and EMBO’s journal agnostic platform for manuscript review, Review Commons. 

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.