5th course "Developmental Genetics of Zebrafish and Medaka Ⅲ"

Organizers	Minoru Tanaka (NIBB)
Venue	National Institute for Basic Biology
Date	Jan. 26-Feb. 2, 2010
Link	Website　（http://www.nibb.ac.jp/course/past/5th/）
Poster

The 5th International practical course at the National Institute for Basic was held for 8 days,  from Tuesday  January 26^th to Tuesday February 2^nd, 2010. It was the third course for small fish, but it was held for the first time using mainly Medaka. The course was designed to meet the needs of a "training course on the model organism medaka" as a rapidly developing research area, which are different from the needs of traditional zebrafish training.

16 students, selected from about 3 times that many applicants, received training on transgenic medaka production methods using BAC, artificial insemination and sperm freezing, and heat induced gene expression. Students also used PCs to work with medaka genome information.

The participants also enjoyed presentations on embryology research and genetic research from invited professors K.Peichel (USA) and C. Winkler (Singapore) who are conducting intensive studies using small fish, in addition to the biology talks and technical lectures conducted by Japanese researchers Prof. Inoue (Kobe Univ.) , Prof. Hatta (Univ. of Hyogo), and Prof. Higashijima (NIPS).

Students also spent the social hours talking about their current research, and enthusiastically discussing technical issues and training content late into the night almost every day during the course. Currently opportunities for students to get this kind of technical training are extremely rare, and this course has shown there is a real demand for this kind of event. (Minoru Tanaka)