London Myology Forum Report
Report by Dr Peter Zammit (King’s College London)
The inaugural meeting of the London Myology Forum, co-sponsored by the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, was hosted at King’s College, London on Friday 2 May 2008.
This initiative is jointly organised by King’s College London, University College London and Imperial College, and aims to generate greater interactions between clinical and basic scientists interested in muscle function and disease.
The programme reflected this aim of further integration with Dr. Ana Ferreiro (INSERM, Institut de Myologie, GH Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France) giving an excellent paper on the role of selenoproteins in congenital muscular dystrophy and Dr. Sue Brown (Imperial College, London, UK) describing a new mouse model of muscle-eye-brain disease. At the more basic science end of the spectrum, Dr. Derek Stemple (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK) described how zebrafish are being used as a model to examine how gene mutations affect muscle function.
Finally, two further international speakers, Dr. Fred Relaix (Faculté de Médecine, GH Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France) and Professor Chaya Kalcheim (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel) described their work on the early aspects of muscle formation that generate distinct populations of muscle stem cells in the embryo, and the genetic networks that control them.
The organisers would especially like to thank the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign for their support with this project, and hope that it will facilitate and generate further research to combat these devastating conditions.
