Open Research Europe presents an interview with Dr Chema Martín-Durán, Senior Lecturer in Organismal Biology at the Queen Mary University of London; Dr Jean-Léon Maître, Team Leader of the Mechanics of Mammalian Development group at Institut Curie; Dr Hervé Turlier, Team Leader of the Multiscale Physics of Morphogenesis group at the Collège de France; and Dr Katharina Sonnen, Group Leader of the Signalling Dynamics group at the Hubrecht Institute.  

They are Guest Advisors of the Developmental Biology Collection on Open Research Europe.  

The aim of this Collection is to collate research that addresses relevant questions in the field of Developmental Biology, including embryogenesis, cell differentiation, tissue repair, and more. The Collection is open to all research, and welcomes the use of established model systems, stem cell-based embryo-like structures, and less studied organisms.  

Read on to find out more about the work of our Guests Advisors, the challenges in this research area, and the role of open science in this field. 

What is your research area and how does it relate to the Developmental Biology Collection? 

Dr Chema Martín-Durán: We work in evolutionary developmental biology or ‘EvoDevo’. This area is at the center of Developmental Biology, as it tries to understand how animal development evolved and its relationship to the evolution of new animal morphologies. This involves studying the embryogenesis of many fascinating and often overlooked animals to cover the diversity of lineages and forms we see today on Earth. 

Dr Jean-Léon Maître: We want to understand how the mammalian embryo shapes itself. For this, we study how the forces that deform the embryo are generated. Usual suspects are the cytoskeleton (a protein structure that allows cells to maintain their shape and internal organization), adhesion molecules, and intercellular fluid. We use microscopy to observe the deformations, biophysical tools to measure the forces, and genetics to perturb them. 

Dr Hervé Turlier: My field of research is the physical modelling of morphogenesis. I am interested in the development of early embryos and the mechanics of tissues. As developmental biology has become more and more quantitative, the need for mathematical and computational models of how cells proliferate, deform, interact, and self-organize to form an embryo or an organ has become more stringent. As a physicist and theoretician, I hope to be able to contribute to the development of the interface between developmental biology and physical modeling within the Developmental Biology Collection. 

Dr Katharina Sonnen: We study how cells communicate with each other to ensure proper development of the mammalian embryo. We particularly focus on the role of signaling dynamics, specifically the change in signaling activity over time. To this end, we use microscopy to visualize cell development and the underlying processes, tools based on microfluidics for the dynamic manipulation of signaling, and combine these with cell biological techniques to dissect the mechanisms.  

What are the biggest challenges of being a researcher in your field? 

Dr Chema Martín-Durán: Developmental biology, like any other biological discipline, is becoming a ‘big data’ driven science. This is clear from the transformative advances in sequencing technologies, which can generate massive amounts of data at single-molecule and single-cell resolution. Being able to handle and extract meaningful information from these large datasets is a big challenge. But it also comes with advantages, making the study of non-model organisms more accessible. 

Dr Jean-Léon Maître: Modern biology has become more quantitative, which led to many discoveries. However, most techniques used in developmental biology remain semi-quantitative or non-quantitative, which means it can be complicated or simply impossible to compare samples, mutants, species, or different studies. 

Dr Hervé Turlier: The biggest challenge when working at the interface of different fields, such as physics and developmental biology, is to really acquire a common language and to understand the logic and the interests of the other fields with which you interact. Once this language barrier has been overcome, I believe that interdisciplinary research can be the most fruitful and lead to new and original lines of research, which would not have been possible in an isolated field. 

Dr Katharina Sonnen: With new methods that are available today, we can measure and perturb developmental processes with high spatiotemporal precision. A challenge is still to transfer such tools to different model systems and developmental stages to make developmental biology in general more quantitative. Another aspect is to combine different methods to start to understand embryonic development down to subcellular mechanistic detail within the context of the entire organism. 

Why is open science important to you and researchers in your field? 

Dr Chema Martín-Durán: We believe data should be accessible to as many researchers as possible so that it can be reused and contribute to new discoveries. Open science is also crucial to making science more inclusive and diverse by engaging countries and communities that might not be able to access data and findings behind a paywall. 

Dr Jean-Léon Maître: Making our data available to the community (as we have systematically done since the opening of the lab), may prevent the unnecessary repetition of experiments and allow this data to be reused by others. This is especially important in the context of experiments that involve animals. Sharing data can reduce the number of experiments needing to be done with animals and minimize the related impacts. Making our data available also increases transparency in research. This will promote trust within the scientific community and of the public towards science. 

Dr Hervé Turlier: Open science principles (public release of raw data and code, free access to publications, reagents and methods, public reviews, etc…) have become key to accelerating research but also to improving reproducibility and trust in science.  

Publication of negative results in open scientific journals should be strongly supported to prevent multiple laboratories from repeating the same unsuccessful trials, which wastes time and money. Open science can also help developing countries access the latest scientific results, which might otherwise remain the preserve of leading research nations.  

However, a fair compromise between intellectual property and knowledge sharing must be reached to protect the potential for innovation in research while aiming for universal access to science. 

Dr Katharina Sonnen: Sharing data and results openly, even prior to peer review, fosters a culture of support, in which researchers work together rather than competing to answer biological questions.  

Another aspect is the open sharing of materials and methods. This includes the detailed description of experimental procedures, making tools such as mouse and cell lines available, and publishing designs of microfluidic chips.  

Both aspects promote the reproducibility of our findings and ensure an efficient advance in science as a whole. 

Are there any challenges to participating in open science within your research area? 

Dr Chema Martín-Durán: Nowadays, public, and open repositories can handle most of the large datasets typically generated in ‘EvoDevo’. The main challenge is convincing the community of the advantages and benefits of open science and how critical it is to move the field forward. This is particularly relevant for studying non-model organisms because easy and open access to techniques and datasets will attract new players and help to generate the critical mass required to advance the study of the development of incredibly fascinating animals. 

Dr Hervé Turlier: While physics can be considered, comparatively, an older field than biology, I am still surprised to see that its evolution has been slower in terms of open science practices. Much computational work in biophysics remains unaccompanied by the sharing of the code that made it possible to obtain the results.  

While in biology the methods are sometimes as important as the results, with a generally very long method section, physicists often have less of a method sharing culture, and rarely share the details of methods that have made it possible to arrive at the results. This can be, in a sense, contrary to the principles of open science, because only insiders are then directly able to extend or translate the results to another field. I hope that physicists will take inspiration from the open scientific culture promoted by their fellow biologists and from European policies. 

Dr Katharina Sonnen: The biggest challenge is making microscopy data available. With new microscopy techniques such as light-sheet microscopy, single datasets get bigger and bigger, and more difficult to handle. Making entire datasets publicly available for others to reproduce their own results or analyze the data to obtain new results is still difficult, despite the establishment of public repositories. 

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