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Name: WENQIAN YU “Faculty” College of Medicine – Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy To attend the European Cytoskeleton Forum 2015 Meeting This year the ECF Meeting took place in Postojna, a small town situated in picturesque Karst countryside of Western Slovenia. The main theme of the ECF 2015 Meeting is the role of the cytoskeleton in human disease development and sessions revolve around all three filaments systems and their associated proteins. This meeting has a particular emphasis on the mechanisms of disease development, including all potential aspects of cell and molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, stem cell biology, as well as different techniques applied in the research of these. The title of our poster is “Vertebrate fidgetin restrains axonal growth by
severing labile domains of microtubules”. The abstract was also chosen to be presented in the mini symposium session “Mechanisms and regulation of the cytoskeleton in the CNS”(presented by our graduated student Lanfranco Leo). This meeting has given me a great opportunity to meet and have discussions with the leading scientists in the field, such as Drs. Sandrine Etienne-­‐Manneville(France), Frank Bradke(German), Monica Sousa (Portugal) and Phillip Gordon Weeks(UK), as well as the graduate students and post doctoral fellow from around the world (UK, Czech Republik, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany,France, and Solovenia, etc.). During the round table meeting, we have made some extremely stimulating discussions on varies very interesting topics, such as: the Drebrin/EB3/Cdk5 Pathway in Neuritogenesis and Prostate Cancer, systemic administration of epothilone B promotes axon regeneration after spinal cord injury, crosstalk between microtubules and intermediate filaments during cell migration, novel concepts of microtubule regulation during neuronal growth, maintenance and degeneration, and adducin in actin rings, axon enlargement and degeneration, etc. People have also given me lots of good ideas and suggestions on our Fidgetin project. In fact, our manuscript has just accepted and published in Cell Report recently. Meeting with those scientists has enabled me to really become close to the cell cytoskeleton research community, and stay in a constant contacts with them to develop future collaborations. Some graduate students have expressed interests to visit our lab as potential candidates as post-­‐doctoral fellows.