With an auditorium full of participants, an international meeting of great importance for the country, dedicated to Biosciences, began this afternoon. The Symposium is organised by IBioBA at the Centro Cultural de la Ciencia (C3).
The founder and former director of the Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires (IBioBA, CONICET-Partner Max Planck), Eduardo Arzt, opened the first day of the “Frontiers in Bioscience 4” Symposium, which will be held until Friday 15 at the Centro Cultural de la Ciencia (C3) of the Polo Científico Tecnológico de Palermo.
“We are very happy to be able to carry out this fourth edition of the Frontiers in Bioscience Symposium. I remember the first one we held in 2012, when we also kicked off the Institute’s activities. Since then, dozens of Max Planck directors have come to participate in these meetings, strengthening ties with researchers and fellows from our and other institutes, as well as with CONICET authorities”, said Arzt in his welcoming remarks.
The first panel today was devoted to microbiology and ecology, with presentations by the director of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Nicole Dubilier; Chilean scientist Esteban Vöhringer-Martínez; and Argentinians Lucas Garibaldi and Amy Austin. The second session focused on tissue dynamics and plasticity, with presentations by Sara Wickström and Jochen Rink, both directors of Max Planck Institutes, and CONICET researcher Gabriela Pagnussat.
The first day of the Symposium culminated with a keynote lecture by Erwin Neher, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1991, who spoke about his research into the mechanisms of synaptic transmission. The meeting will continue until Friday with sessions on neurobiology, cell and molecular biology, signalling, microbiology, structural biology and plant biology.
The Symposium also features poster sessions in which more than 190 fellows and researchers from different parts of the country will be presenting their ongoing research. The event is a postgraduate academic activity and scientific dissemination of IBioBA, carried out in the framework of the Mercosur FOCEM Biomedicine Project. The scientific coordination was in charge of Eduardo Arzt, founder of IBioBA and CONICET researcher, and Herbert Jäckle, former vice-president of Max Planck.