Raéden Gray and Alexa Burger represented ZAPP at the Society for Developmental Biology 85th Annual Meeting (SDB 2026) held in Las Vegas, Nevada, July 22 to 26, 2026. SDB is one of the most prestigious conferences centered around developmental biology. Scientists who study the development of aquatic models, including zebrafish, present their research at SDB through talks, poster presentations and networking. The meeting served as an ideal platform for ZAPP members to introduce the project and its goals to developmental biologists.
Gray, currently a post-doc at the University of Colorado Anschutz, and the wet lab scientist representative of ZAPP, had the opportunity to present the current state of the Zebrafish Atlas and Annotation Toolkit in a poster session on July 25th. Her abstract and poster were titled: Characterizing the Ethanol Sensitivity of the Wnt Canonical Pathway in Jaw Development using Standardized Reporting. Using data from her work on ethanol-treated zebrafish, she provided attendees with real-life examples of how using standardized ontologies in image annotation, a key goal of ZAPP, will greatly improve literature, reproducibility, and data sharing.
Gray received incredible feedback, including a suggestion to partner with journals to require authors to include a table with standardized IDs that annotate specific conditions and phenotypes in their submitted manuscripts. Another highlight for Gray was the audience’s excitement when she spoke about the soon-to-come Annotation Toolkit and phenotype picker which will help facilitate standardized reporting for non-standard-savvy scientists. Although working with Ciona rather than zebrafish, another scientist expressed hope that this becomes a standard practice not only for zebrafish researchers, but for those studying other model organisms as well; we couldn’t agree more!
Overall, SDB 2026 proved to be a great opportunity to introduce ZAPP to developmental biologists, highlighting its goal to accelerate scientific discovery through the adoption of shared standards.