The "NIBB-Academia Sinica International Webinar of Aquatic Model Organisms for Basic Biology to Human Disease Models" was held online on Friday, March 5, 2021. While a training course jointly organized by NIBB and Academia Sinica was expected to be held in 2020, it was postponed to Autumn 2022 due to the spread of the novel coronavirus. In response to this, the course’s organizers planned the abovementioned webinar to be a new international cooperative activity to be conducted when circumstances make it difficult to travel between countries, especially during this global pandemic. A total of 11 lecturers were invited: two for the Plenary Lecture (China and Singapore), three each from NIBB and Academia Sinica, and three from past lecturers and participants of the NIBB International Practical Courses. A total of 100 people from Japan, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, India, Singapore, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, Canada, and Argentina participated in this webinar.
　The lectures covered a wide variety of aquatic organisms, from corals and sea urchins to amphibians and bony fishes. The topics of the lectures covered a wide range of research fields, including development, evolution, genomics, neurophysiology, and immune response to pathogens. In the NIBB session, Dr. Yusuke Sakai (NIBB Research Fellow in the Division of Morphogenesis until FY2020, currently Post-doctoral Researcher at Osaka City University) presented "Light-responsive behaviors of reef-building coral larvae", Dr. Kenichi Suzuki (Specially Appointed Associate Professor in the Center for the Development of New Model Organisms) presented "The involvement of thyroid hormone receptors in Xenopus metamorphosis", and Dr. Yukiko Kimura (Assistant Professor in the Division of Behavioral Neurobiology) presented "The functional analysis of V1 neurons in zebrafish larvae”.
　In the post-event questionnaire, 97% of the respondents answered that the webinar content was interesting, and many gave high marks to the lecture content and management. During this webinar, we attempted to foster dialogue via Slack in the form of a typed chat format week-long question and answer period to encourage our participants to discuss the issues. 86% of them felt that Slack was easy to use, while others preferred direct discussions with all lecturers and participants. In addition, there were useful comments such as the timing of breaks, which will be helpful in organizing future webinars.
　The webinar itself saw roughly 50-60 people consistently joining us online. Initially, we expected that most participants would be from Asian countries due to time differences. However, a tangibly good aspect of the online format was that the number of registered participants had expanded worldwide. We would like to continue such activities, not only from the perspective of international exchange under the current circumstances of international travel bans being in effect, but also by taking advantage of the webinar's ability to attract participants from more diverse countries. Lastly, this webinar was sponsored by NBRP Medaka. We would like to thank them as well.
 
Kiyoshi Naruse (IBBP Center / Lab. of Bioresources)
Yasuhiro Kamei (Lab. of Thermobiology / Spectrography and Bioimaging Facility)
Ai Shinomiya (ExCELLS / Lab. of Biological Diversity)