📢Preprint: Positional information (PI) and information flows in dynamic tissues.
Our mathematical framework quantifies, from data, how the coupled stochastic dynamics of cell positions and properties preserve, degrade and generate PI. @alex-plum.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Congratulations to UC Santa Barbara's David Gross, who just won the 2026 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, for a lifetime of groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics—from the strong force to string theory.
Full story: https://ow.ly/ZzyO50YMjzv
Our latest work on shape-programmable tissues is out in @science.org. By positioning topological defects in cellular nematics, we encode frustrated 2D force fields that relax into predictable 3D shapes. Collaboration with Marino Arroyo’s lab, led by @pauguillamat.bsky.social at @ibecbarcelona.eu.
Temperature affects all biological rates, but how do we model its effects? Our 2-part review brings together modeling approaches from empirical curve fits to microscopic kinetics to network-level dynamics 🧵
Part I: doi.org/10.1016/j.coisb.2026.100577
Part II: doi.org/10.1016/j.coisb.2026.100578
For scaling-laws aficionados (I am one), here are the graphs showing power-law behavior for vasculature for embryos (macaque, mouse, turtle).
This means that the vasculature of developing embryos is scale free fractal.
More here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Congratulations to Vikas Trivedi & collaborators for being awarded the HFSP grant!
An international team coordinated by EMBL Barcelona researchers has been awarded $1.5M to study how developing organisms stay on track despite climate-driven temperature instability.
www.embl.org/news/awards-...
An independent arXiv
I'm a bit late passing this news on, but a few weeks ago arXiv announced that from 1st July 2026 it will be establishing itself as an "independent nonprofit organization". It has been hosted for many years by Cornell University. You can read here about the reasons for this and…
Now #published @physreve.bsky.social: "Elasticity and plasticity of epithelial gap closure"
doi.org/10.1103/qtcv-gk3y
#PhD work of Maryam Setoudeh, a model of cell intercalations during epiboly as elastoplastic deformations of a surface.
@mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social
How do pairs of DNA loci - such as enhancers and promoters - find each other inside the nucleus? 🤔
Most models assume the random forces driving locus motion are independent in space
New preprint by
@janniharju.bsky.social: this assumption fails in living cells 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Here are some cute little wild zebrafish that we found in Nepal!
🧪🐟
Glob-glob! Absolutely magical sea anemone larva (about 7 mm) from The Lombok Strait, Indonesia 🇮🇩
First 24 hours of embryonic development in 9 different animal species: (From left to right) Zebrafish, Sea urchin, Black widow spider, Tardigrade, Sea squirt, Comb jelly, Parchment tube worm, Roundworm, Slipper snail. Credit to @tessamontague.bsky.social & Zuzka Vavrušová. #ZebrafishZunday #devbio 🧪
Condensates are powerful ways to break symmetry and cells do remarkable things with them. Here we show that in a multinucleate fungus, a condensate regulates translation of a cyclin and a formin in distinct locations.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New Perspective form Rory Maizels & me: "Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations"
Gene regulatory networks are supposed to give us mechanistic explanations of development, so why are we drowning in 'hairballs' of statistical correlations?
rdcu.be/e7zx7
Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).
A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)
Wild-caught zebrafish in Nepal 🦓🐟
We summarised the many roles of material phase transitions in development (and they are not just mechanical 🤔)
New preprint!
arxiv.org/abs/2602.08105
We use mutual information to find the shared dimensionality of shared latent space between two high-dimensional variables. Turning inference into optimization, we use it to figure out dofs in movies and critical scaling in Ising!
Advanced grad students + postdocs: apply for the 2026 #kitpqbio summer course, "Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals," at buff.ly/OXXMKEv. Apply by Feb. 1.
Course directors Adrienne Roeder (Cornell) and Sebastian Streichan (UCSB)
Instructors include @akankshi.bsky.social, @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social, @dianapinheiro.bsky.social, @chloeroffay.bsky.social, & @streichan.bsky.social among others! 🐟
Seconded. If anything, it has never been a better time to be a biophysicist, a complex system physicists, etc…. And it is a bit sad that much of it now happens *outside* of physics departments (for good and bad reasons…)
Really excited to share our new paper in @nature.com! We uncovered how a physical instability of the cytoplasm coupled with the cell cycle drives cytoplasmic partitioning in early embryos #zebrafish #drosophila. Read more in this🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩
@poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de
Next Monday 26th Jan, we are very excited to hear two talks from Margot Smit @likeyoda1.bsky.social and Susan Wopat @suewop.bsky.social!
Visit our website(ucammorphogenesisseries.com) for more details, and be sure to subscribe to our mailing list(lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/u...). See you soon!!
Looking forward to sharing my postdoctoral work in just a little over a week at the UCAM Morphogenesis Series! 🐟🔬🔦
The Cambridge Morphogenesis Seminar Series is back! 🎉
Check out the flyer for a great lineup of speakers for Lent Term 2026!
Don't forget to subscribe to our mailing list to get all the information, including the Zoom link. We are excited to see you again soon 👋
Feb 1 deadline approaching for our @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social QBio summer course on Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals. @streichan.bsky.social
@maurazimmermann.bsky.social @maizel-lab.org @yusuke-mori.bsky.social @akankshi.bsky.social @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social
How does a uniform zygote reliably break symmetry?
How do initially identical cells diverge in cell-cycle timing and transcriptional state?
In our new paper in Nature Physics, we show that embryo geometry itself is sufficient to pattern early development.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A screenshot of the 'The hard truth about how hard it is to publish in Development' article PDF.
The hard truth about how hard it is to publish in Development
Editor-in-Chief @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social leads our team of Academic Editors in addressing the perception that Development is ‘too hard to publish in’ by discussing the journal's review process.
doi.org/10.1242/dev....
Open-source atlas of fruit fly development DynamicAtlas is a high-res framework for morphological studies
📹 M. F. Lefebvre, V. Jain-Sharma, N. Claussen & N. P. Mitchell et al @streichan.bsky.social lab University of California Santa Barbara in @natmethods.nature.com
➡️ bpod.org.uk/archive/2026...
Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
