The Astiz Lab was very happy to welcome Dr. Malte Spielmann and his team for their lab retreat in Bilbao this September. Dr. Mariana Astiz started collaborating with Dr. Malte Spielmann in Lübeck (Germany) in 2020.  This collaboration has resulted in exciting insights about the development and maturation of the master pacemaker in the mouse hypothalamus, being pivotal to orient our current research lines and still holding so much potential for our future research questions.

Our lab was warmly invited to join Spielmann’s lab retreat where we could hear about the projects they are working on. Dr. Mariana Astiz also shared our ongoing projects engaging both groups in a vivid discussion of ideas that kept going into almost the dinner table! It was a fantastic opportunity for the two labs to meet and enjoy scientific conversations about current projects and opportunities to contribute to each other's work.

We also had the pleasure to attend the Achucarro Seminar given by Dr. Malte Spielmann on Friday and entitled “Development and disease at single-cell resolution”. We were not the only ones amazed by the incredible potential of single-cell technologies to uncover the origins of rare genetic diseases and got carried away by the enthusiasm of the speaker. It was a top-quality talk and enriching experience that resulted in a strong interest in the topic during the Q&A session. 

Big thanks to the Spielmann Lab: Kristian Händler, Verónica Yumiceba, Helene Faust, Lucía Morato Gomez, Josh Kim, Patricia Schröder, Saranya Balachandran, Luise Martin, Jelena Pozojevic, Daniel Kaschta, Varun Sreenivasan, Anneli Warnecke and Malte Spielmann. 

It was a pleasure to meet you all and we hope to do this again in the future! 
We could not have chosen a better way to close the summer season 😄.