It has been a busy summer of science. Since my last blog about the International Congress of Neuroendocrinology in Nagoya, Japan, I have also been to the British Society for Neuroendocrinology Early Career Researchers Meeting in Manchester and, most recently, the SEBBM Congress in Tarragona.
After the pressures of teaching, marking and university administration, it has been refreshing to spend some time focusing mainly on research again. Conferences provide an opportunity to hear about new work, meet collaborators and catch up with colleagues ... but preparing to give a talk is also valuable in its own right.
Putting a talk together forces you to decide exactly what you want to say. This is particularly true when you only have 20 minutes to say it. What is the central message? Which experiments are essential to the story? What does the audience really need to understand? I have always thought that if you can explain something clearly, you probably understand it. The reverse is also true: when an explanation becomes complicated or doesn’t quite flow, it often reveals a gap in your own knowledge or critical thinking. Preparing a talk can therefore be a surprisingly useful test of how well you understand your own research. The same principle applies to students. Trying to explain a scientific idea in their own words often shows them where they need to think a little more deeply.
My talk in Tarragona was called It’s All in the Seasoning: How Seasonal Timing Reprograms Metabolic Physiology. It focused on a biological rhythm that receives rather less attention than the circadian clock: the seasonal clock.
We are all familiar with the changing length of the day across the year. For seasonal animals, however, this changing light signal is not simply a feature of summer and winter. It provides essential information that allows them to anticipate what is coming and adjust their physiology accordingly. Changes in photoperiod can alter food intake, body weight, reproductive function, metabolism and behaviour. Our research is interested in how this environmental signal reaches the brain and how it changes the molecular and cellular environment within the hypothalamus. In particular, we study tanycytes, specialised cells lining the third ventricle, which play an important role in translating seasonal signals into changes in brain function and physiology.
The talk also allowed me to bring together some of our newer work examining how photoperiod affects memory, neuroinflammation, oxidative stress and markers of brain plasticity. Looking across these studies reinforced an important point: seasonal timing does not just alter individual genes or pathways. It changes the physiological state of the animal, including the environment in which the brain operates.
Tarragona was such a wonderful place to discuss this work. It was great to see so much exciting science happening in Spain, including the research of the Nutrigenomics Research group and their work on phenolic compounds, biological timing and metabolic health. These conversations highlighted how closely seasonal biology connects with broader questions about nutrition, metabolism and when the body is best equipped to respond to environmental challenges.
The summer has involved a lot of travelling, presenting and talking about science. It has also reminded me how much I enjoy stepping back from individual experiments and thinking about the bigger story they are beginning to tell.
I have neglected this blog for a little too long, so I am going to try to use it more regularly, not only for conference updates, but also to write about the science itself. Seasonal rhythms seem like a very good place to start.