Life on the Edge: Exploring Biological Boundaries

Dinos once ruled the Earth, but now? Now, they run the oceans.

A PhD student at EMBL, Chandni is interested in studying marine biodiversity at a subcellular scale and understanding the link between ultrastructure and ecological shifts. Associated with EMBL’s expedition-based project TREC, Chandni and her colleagues explore the vast richness of marine protists across the European coastline, studying them in their natural environmental context.

On any given day, we humans - we mammals - produce millions of new cells. However, our body size does not change drastically since we lose a similar number of cells on a daily basis. Other vertebrates, like fish, produce way more cells than the ones they lose and, therefore, persistently increase their body size. Strangely, though, the daily production of new cells in mammals and fish is fuelled by so-called stem cells.

Prof. Lazaro Centanin will talk about how stem cells mediate cell renewal, growth, and even regeneration of lost tissues and stress the many things we can learn by studying stem cells in fish.