April 1, 2005 – The RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (Kobe, Japan) has entered into an affiliation with the Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine. This marks the latest of a growing number of local graduate schools that have formalized ties with the CDB, allowing laboratory heads from the Center to serve as visiting faculty at the partner institution and to allow graduate students to do bench work for their theses in CDB labs. The new affiliation promises to build even stronger links between the two institutions by making it simpler for CDB labs to host students from this world-class university and for Osaka Ph. D. candidates to take of the Center’s research environment.