[Xenopus] we want your old frogs and your input into Tabula Rana

[Peshkin, Leon]

Dear Colleagues

If you have old(-er) frogs in your colonies, these are very valuable to our developing research agenda on "aging biology in frogs".
Please get in touch with Leon Peshkin (peshkin at gmail.com<mailto:peshkin at gmail.com>, SUBJECT: OLD FROGS) if you are planning to sacrifice an old frog, we would ether try to get it from you or ask you to take some quick biopsies / tissue snips for us.  Of interest are X.laevis frogs older than 10 years and X.tropicalis older than 6 years, but of particular value X.laevis older than 20 or X.trops older than 10. If there is some uncertainty about the age but you have a solid guess that is also good. We also appreciate any anecdotes about frogs longevity, health and fertility. Here is our first preprint on so-called DNA methylation clocks which are likely the first such clocks outside of mammals:
"Age-associated DNA methylation changes in Xenopus frogs"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.22.500491v1

As Marko mentioned, Peshkin at HMS and Horb at MBL got funded to create "Tabula Rana" - the frog cell type atlas. This is meant to be a highly collaborative effort with Xenbase and all of you. We are presently setting up single-cell platforms to be used at the NXR with the assistance of a trained technician. We are thinking of bringing 15-20 people together to MBL for a Xenopus Jamboree 2.0 (see https://kleintools.hms.harvard.edu/tools/tree_data/Xenopus/Jamboree.Genesis.dvg.23383.pdf)  to dissect tissues from embryos and
adults in a consistent way, assisted by technicians, to profile everything with multiple technologies in parallel and get a massive push for Tabula Rana. This will also be a boot camp to traian people in single cell and new satellite protocols.  Please get in touch with Leon Peshkin (peshkin at gmail.com<mailto:peshkin at gmail.com>, SUBJECT: Tabula Rana) with your input on:
 - Would you like to help organize and fund Xenopus Jamboree 2.0 ?
 - Would you like to participate if Jamboree 2.0 eventually takes place?
 - Would you like to build a training aspect into Jamboree 2.0 - which single cell tech you know and which do you want to learn ?
 - Would you like to participate in a focused working group (or be a solitary curator) for a specific tissue, which one ?
 - Any other idea of how to organize Tabula Rana to be most beneficial to the whole Xenopus community and beyond ...

Leon Peshkin & Marko Horb

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