ABCD turns thirty and we celebrated the anniversary with an international meeting that was held in Ravenna, Italy, at the Palazzo dei Congressi, from 12 to 14 September 2013.

The Congress was open to all researchers, from Italy and abroad, interested in the areas of cell biology and differentiation and offered a unique opportunity to discuss the state of the art and future challenges of these important scientific areas.

Twenty-one eminent plenary speakers have energized the meeting which was attended by 330 participants, most of them young scientists, who came from all over Italy and from Europe.

In particular, the meeting was enriched by 6 plenary lectures, by Margaret Buckingham, Pietro De Camilli, Luigi Naldini, Daniel St Johnston, Fiona Watt, and Lazaro Centanin and by five plenary sessions, covering important area of science such as, Autophagy, Cell Migration and Invasion, Cellular Mechanisms of Aging, Epigenetics, Organelle Homeostasis and Disease.

In addition, four parallel sessions covered the “traditional” areas of interest of the ABCD such as, Cell Stress: Survival and Apoptosis, Mechanisms of Signal Transduction, Membrane Trafficking and Organelle Biogenesis, Stem Cells, Development and Regenerative Medicine.

About the six plenary speakers, Margaret Buckingham talked about regulation of muscle stem cell fate and proposed a model in which post-transcriptional mechanisms in the adult, hold quiescent stem cells poised to enter a tissue specific differentiation programme.

Pietro De Camilli discussed about the phosphoinositide signaling in the control of membrane dynamics and interactions with particular emphasis on the role of the Extended-Synaptotagmins, a family of ER-localized enzymes which share similarity to synaptotagmin, in the control of PI(4,5)P2-dependent and Ca2+-regulated interactions of the ER with the plasma membrane.

Luigi Naldini has pioneered the development and applications of lentiviral vectors for gene transfer and he discussed how the lentiviral vectors have become one of the most widely used tool in biomedical research and, upon recently entering clinical testing, are providing a long sought hope of cure for several currently untreatable and otherwise deadly human diseases.

The talk of Daniel St Johnston was related to epithelial polarity and spindle orientation. Using the drosophila follicular epithelium as a model to investigate how the spindle is aligned perpendicular to the apical-basal axis of the cell he showed that spindle orientation does not require apical, junctional or basal cues, as previously proposed, and depends instead on a novel spindle orientation pathway.

Fiona Watt clarified how stem cell behavior is controlled both by intrinsic mechanisms and by external signals from the local microenvironment or niche. Using adult epidermis as an experimental model, she discussed that interactions with the niche are reciprocal, since stem cells are capable of remodelling their environment.

Lazaro Centanin discussed about the identification of retinal stem cells (RSCs) using the temporo/spatial organization of the fish retina and followed the complete offspring of a single cell during the postnatal life. RSCs generate two tissues of the adult fish retina, the neural retina (NR) and the retinal-pigmented epithelium (RPE). Despite their common embryonic origin and tight coordination during continuous organ growth, the group of Centanin proved that NR and RPE are maintained by dedicated RSCs that contribute in a fate-restricted manner to either one or the other tissue.

The meeting ended with the touching closing remarks of professor Francesco Clementi, first president of ABCD, who narrates the history of 30 years of ABCD, and with the enthusiasm of Pier Paolo Di Fiore, current ABCD president, who informed all attendees that ABCD has reached the milestone of 500 members.

With the combination of outstanding science and the fascinating art, history and culinary traditions of Ravenna, we succeeded to celebrate in the best way the thirty anniversary of ABCD.