Media for Science Forum: poor organization, disappointing use of social media

A science journalism congress was held last week in Madrid, Spain, under the name Media for Science Forum (MFSF). This was a European congress dealing "with strategic issues about science communication and science journalism and its social dimension." One of its specific objectives was declared to be: "Explore new trends in Science Communication due to the web 2.0".

Well, this sounded really exciting to me (and registration was free!), so I planned to attend the congress. Unfortunately, the organization rejected my application due to the huge amount of requests received.

So, I couldn't attend the meeting in Madrid --but I followed the events from my home at London, using the internet.

This post describes my personal experience of MFSF, including a few thoughts about the use of social media. You are more than welcome to add your comments at the end of the post.


March 18th

I first learnt about the upcoming Media for Science Forum (MFSF) through an announcement made on the SINC webpage (in Spanish). SINC (www.plataformasinc.es) is a news agency focused on scientific research done at Spanish institutions and research done by Spaniards at foreign institutions.

After visiting the MSFS official webpage, I filled and sent the online registration form the very same day. Registration was free but seats were limited: the organization would contact me in due time to accept or reject my application.

After registration, I was expecting to receive an email, automatically generated by the system, acknowledging my registration and providing some additional information --this seems a common procedure for online forms--, but this message did not arrive.

Anyway, I sent a tweet to inform my Twitter followers about the event, suggesting a possible hashtag. I also announced the conference on the Science Writers Facebook page.


April 4th

Over two weeks passed, but I didn't receive any email from the organization, and no new information was posted on the MFSF website. So I sent them an email including all my personal information and a link to my CV. I also explained them that I needed to know about the success or failure of my application in a short time, as I eventually had to make some arrangements for my trip London-Madrid.


April 6th

The MFSF organization forwarded me an email, which was supposed to be sent to me on March 18th (but I had not received). The message thanked me for the registration and informed that I'd be contacted again by the organization about the possible success of my application. When? "Soon." No more details were included.


April 7th

I received an email with the following request: "We have had problems in our system, and I have to ask you to reconfirm the dates that you are planning to attend the Forum".

The problem is that the email did not come from the congress organization but from a known Spanish travel agency. I checked the MFSF website (again) looking for some explanation or connection to this travel agency: I couldn't find anything. Anyway, I replied with the requested information: I planned to attend both days (12th and 13th May).


April 12th

MFSF started to use Twitter and Facebook!

I thought: "Great, they'll keep us informed about what's going on."

Oh, how wrong I was...


April 14th

New email from the travel agency, including a message from the MFSF organizers: they started a blog!

"Excellent, another channel to keep in touch with us! Now we'll get some news!" -- or so I thought.

I wasn't sure if that message meant that my application had been successful, so I requested some information about it. They replied immediately: "Nobody is receiving any confirmation. The organizers are still receiving applications, and they haven't made any decisions yet. We will inform you in due time" (my Spanish-to-English translation).


April 28th

During the previous days I had exchanged a few messages with other members of a LinkedIn group (Periodismo científico y divulgativo, which is Spanish for "Science journalism"), and learnt that nobody seemed to have received any confirmation regarding their MFSF application.

So I posted a message on the MFSF Facebook page, requesting information (to see my message there, you need to click on "Media for Science and others", as the default page only shows messages written by the organizers).

They never replied to my message on Facebook.


April 29th

Six weeks after my registration, and 13 days before the event, the MFSF organizers sent me an email: "Unfortunately your request to participate on the congress has been denied due to the huge amount of requests received."

You can imagine this didn't make me very happy.

Anyway, I still expected to know more about the MFSF talks and discussions through the internet, by making use of social media.


May 12th: first day of the congress

Early in the morning, I learnt from Twitter (actually, I think it was through this Topsy search) that the MFSF talks were going to be broadcasted through live web streaming.

Oh, wait, it appeared that only the opening talk was to be transmitted.

Note that I didn't get that information thanks to MFSF "Web 2.0" tools: their blog, Twitter and Facebook pages were all mute about this issue at the time (and even later).

The opening talk --the only one that was to be live streamed-- was untitled and in charge of the General Director of FECYT (Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology). This didn't sound very exciting to me. So, I forgot about MFSF for the rest of the day. My plan was to check the internet for related discussions on the following days.


May 13th: second and last day of the congress

At midday, I was surprised to know (through Twitter, but not MFSF Twitter) that the forum broadcast was still live!

Although with some interruptions in the service, they had been transmitting the whole thing!? Apparently, this was just an unplanned, happy idea. Well, I guess nobody had thought about this possibility before...???

Anyway, so I was able to watch the afternoon talks. These included brief descriptions of European scientific news services (such as AlphaGalileo), and the final conclusions (which were not such a thing but a list of general recommendations). Nice, but not incredibly useful.


Today, May 20th
Today I've been searching the internet, including Twitter, for reactions to MFSF (see links below). It seems that the congress was quite popular on Twitter: the hashtag #mfsf (not the one I suggested) became the second trending topic on Twitter in Spain. That's pretty good for a science journalism congress!

...Although it must be said that many tweets were messages of the lifecasting type ("On my way to Madrid...", "Having a beer in...", and the like), which in my opinion only contribute to the noise -- when they are tagged with a congress hashtag.

From what I can read on the internet, it seems that most people found the forum interesting -- too bad my application was rejected. On the negative side, MFSF was poorly planned, and failed to provide essential information to potential attendees and the general public.

In particular, their use of social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter) for updates and conversation was really disappointing -- and remember that one of their specific objectives was to "explore new trends in science communication due to the web 2.0". After the first hello message, MFSF published only 10 messages on Twitter and 13 updates on Facebook (numbers correct at the time of writing this) -- and all these messages were just announcements of new blog posts. No updates about registration issues, no announcements concerning the live web broadcasting, no comments on specific talks, no conversation at all. That is useless to me.


Reactions to MFSF:
- No hay que ser innovador... tan sólo parecerlo [in Spanish] by Javi Peláez. La aldea irreductible, May 12th, 2010.
- Media for Science Forum (1), (2) and (3) [in Catalan] by Miquel Duran. Edunomia, May 12-13-14, 2010.
- Media for Science Forum and (II) [in Catalan] by Pep Anton Vieta. Pepquímic, May 12-15, 2010.
- Media for Science Forum 2010 – ein Rückblick [in German] by Hans-Dieter Zimmermann. FHS eSociety Blog, May 18th, 2010.
- El estado del periodismo científico, en el Media For Science Forum de Madrid [in Spanish but with English introduction] by Pere Estupinyà. Knight Science Journalism Tracker, May 19th, 2010.

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My selection of YouTube videos related to the microbial world

During the last couple of years I've been collecting some YouTube videos related to microbiology. My microbiology playlist includes now over 70 videos of very different styles, including not only academic lectures and documentaries, but also animated movies and funny songs.

You can watch many of these videos using the embedded viewer (see below).

Or, you can watch all of them on my YouTube channel. You will find there other playlists, including:
- Microscopy
- Molecular and Cell Biology
- Other sciences

Please let me know if you find any of the playlists useful or, at least, entertaining.

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Uncovering beauty in proteins to fight the pneumococcal fratricides

This post is about pneumonia and pneumococci, fratricide at the cellular level, and a pretty protein. And there's a video too!


First things first. Pneumonia is a common disease characterized by inflammation of the lungs that can be deadly: 4 million people in the world die from it every year. Half of them are children under 5 years of age -- in fact, no other illness causes more deaths of children under age 5 worldwide. However, this is a preventable and treatable disease in most cases.


Many organisms can cause pneumonia, but the usual culprits are the bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae (or pneumococcus, see above image) and, less frequently, Haemophilus influenzae type b (a.k.a. Hib). Safe and effective vaccines and antibiotics have been developed for these infections. Unfortunately, they are not commonly available in most developing countries, where pneumonia allies with poor nutrition, other illnesses (e.g. AIDS) and lack of resources to contribute to the cycle of poverty. To know more about the impact of pneumonia on world health and what can be done about it, I recommend listening to this podcast and visiting the World Pneumonia Day website.


My only direct contact with pneumococcus research was... hum... many years ago. As an undergraduate student, I spent two months at the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas (CIB, Center for Biological Research) in Madrid, Spain, where I learnt how to cultivate pneumococci and some techniques for the study of lytic enzymes. These remarkable enzymes play a key role in bacterial physiology by cleaving, in a regulated fashion, specific linkages in peptidoglycan (that is, the highly cross-linked polymer that forms the bacterial cell wall). This apparently destructive activity is essential for cell wall turnover, and allows cell growth and division. Interestingly, the genomes of some bacteriophages (or bacterial viruses) also encode lytic enzymes, which the viruses use to break the cell wall and escape from its dying host after viral replication. These enzymes could be useful as antibacterial agents.


A few days ago I was happy to learn that a group of Spanish researchers --some of them from the CIB-- had solved the 3D structure of one of the pneumococcal lytic enzymes, called LytC. What I find remarkable is how the 3D structure elegantly explains the peculiar role that this protein plays during a process known as pneumococcal fratricide.

Some bacteria produce substances that kill surrounding microbes, and use the resulting dead bodies as a source of nutrients. Sometimes, killer and victim belong to the same species, or even they are siblings. In these cases, researchers speak of cannibalism or fratricide; although if you view microbial populations as coordinated, multicellular entities, then you may prefer to use the term programmed cell death.

Among pneumococci, some cells in a population become competent in response to certain signals; which means that they are able to take up DNA from their surroundings, and incorporate this genetic information into their own chromosome. This way, competent cells can acquire new inheritable abilities -- such as production of a new capsule type, or resistance to an antibiotic -- that can be very important for their survival (this was the underlying mechanism in the famous Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment that helped identify DNA as the hereditary material in cells).

But competent pneumococci do something else: they encourage non-competent siblings and other closely-related bacteria to commit suicide. They do this by releasing a particular lytic enzyme, called CbpD, that diffuses through the milieu and --somehow-- activates LytC and other lytic enzymes that are already present in the non-competent siblings. Cell wall weakening finally results in a big bang; that is, the explosion of the non-competent pneumococci. The materials released serve not only as nutrients and sources of genetic information (DNA), but also as virulence factors that help competent cells to survive in their human host.


The 3D structure of LytC now provides the clues to explain the enzyme's peculiar behaviour during pneumococcal fratricide. Have a look at the model of LytC on the left: ain't it a beauty? A substrate-binding module (in blue and green in the image) recognizes and binds the cell wall peptidoglycan, whereas a catalytic module (in red) is responsible for breaking a specific linkage in the substrate. Because of the unusual hook shape of the protein, the substrate-binding module and the catalytic module partially block each other. As a result, LytC cannot bind the highly cross-linked peptidoglycan that is predominant under normal circumstances. Only when CbpD or other lytic enzymes cut specific linkages in the cell wall, LytC is able to bind the 'loosened' peptidoglycan and comes into action -- with deleterious consequences for the non-competent pneumococci.


To make the story even more attractive (at least to me), the researchers bothered to produce a video that illustrates -- in a fascinating way -- the pneumococcal fratricide and the mechanism for LytC activation. Please watch it, the background music is nice too. The video includes some captions in Spanish, but I uploaded the video to YouTube and added English subtitles for a wider audience. I hope more researchers will get into the trouble of making visually attractive videos or presentations of their work (and make them freely available), it really makes a difference...




I also add here a nice composite image from the press release, just because I think it's so beautiful:




Reference for the 3D structure of LytC:
Pérez-Dorado, I., González, A., Morales, M., Sanles, R., Striker, W., Vollmer, W., Mobashery, S., García, J., Martínez-Ripoll, M., García, P., & Hermoso, J. (2010). Insights into pneumococcal fratricide from the crystal structures of the modular killing factor LytC Nature Structural & Molecular Biology DOI: 10.1038/nsmb.1817


Recommended links:
- World Pneumonia Day (November 12th).
- Keith Klugman - Pneumonia: the hidden giant. In this podcast, Carl Zimmer interviews Keith Klugman, Chair of Global Health at Emory University, USA.
- Klugman's crusade by Valerie Gregg. Public Health Magazine, Emory University, spring 2006.
- Neumococos fratricidas [in Spanish], noticia publicada en la web del CSIC (20 de abril, 2010).
- Los neumococos fratricidas [in Spanish]. RTVE.es (20-04-2010).


Other relevant scientific articles:
- Bacterial programmed cell death and multicellular behavior in bacteria [free article] by Hanna Engelberg-Kulka et al. PLoS Genet. (2006) 2(10): e135.
- Cannibalism and fratricide: mechanisms and raisons d'être by Jean-Pierre Claverys & Leiv S. Håvarstein. Nat. Rev. Microbiol. (2007) 5: 219-29.
- Bacteriophage lysins as effective antibacterials [free article] by Vincent A. Fischetti. Curr. Opin. Microbiol. (2008) 11: 393–400.
- Pneumococcus: the sugar-coated bacteria [free PDF] by Rubens López. Intl. Microbiol. (2006) 9: 179-190.


Image sources:
- Streptococcus pneumoniae in spinal fluid. FA stain (digitally colorized). Content Providers(s): CDC/Dr. M.S. Mitchell. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
- World Pneumonia Day logo.
- Nature Structural & Molecular Biology cover, May 2010, Volume 17 No 5.
- LytC model, LytC and pneumococci: both images from press release, CSIC.es

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