so the people who think this is cheating, do they also mill their own flour for baking? refine their own sugar? these are all just ingredients, why not use them?

A family of linear plasmid phages that detect a quorum-sensing autoinducer exists in multiple bacterial species | mBio The discovery of quorum-sensing responsive linear plasmid phages has transformed understanding of phage-bacterial interactions by demonstrating inter-domain chemical communication. To date, however, e...

The final form of my 2nd postdoc paper with the Bassler Lab! Turns out our favorite quorum-sensing phage isn’t a one-off, but rather a member of a globally dispersed family of phages that sense a universal autoinducer.

#phagesky #microsky

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

I'll take that with a side of Lipitor... ;-)

Lab re-union at #cellbio2025 - great to see everyone again and hear about the interesting new science they are doing!

An Algebraic Approach to Representing Mitochondrial Dynamics This paper addresses the increasing need for comprehensive mathematical descriptions of cell organization by examining the algebraic structure of mitochondrial network dynamics. Mitochondria are cellu...

you can read about it here:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The cell is a crowded place where organelles are packed together . In her talk this afternoon Dec 9 at CellBio2025 in the Quantitative Modeling session room 122, Mary Mirvis will show her work using soft x-ray tomography to explore how packing interactions affect organelle shape and interaction.

The cell is a crowded place where organelles are packed together . In poster B365 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8 in the Quantitative Modeling session room 122, Mary Mirvis uses soft x-ray tomography to explore how packing interactions affect organelle shape and interaction.

Mitochondria form dynamic networks that can be represented as graphs. But the space of graphs is complex. In poster 376 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8, Raphie Mostov presents a mathematical approach to represent mitochondria far more simply.

Stentor is a single cell with a complex cortical pattern showing anterior/posterior polarization In poster 410 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8, Yina Hudnall shows a role for posterior-enriched mRNA that encoding DNA binding proteins.

Also check out her talk monday afternoon Mini-symposium session on Evolutionary Cell Biology at 4:47 in room 120

Stentor is a single cell that can regenerate missing pieces, but how does it know when something is missing? In poster 406 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8, Connie Yan shows that conserved cell cycle machinery plays a key role in triggering cellular regeneration.

The giant ciliate Stentor has a macronucleus that undergoes a dramatic shape change during cellular regeneration. In poster 038 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8, I present work by Isabella Ibalio showing that histone modifications correlate with these dramatic nuclear shape changes.

so cute!!!

Flagellar length control in Chlamydomonas is a paradigm for organelle size regulation. In poster 163 at CellBio2025 Sunday Dec 7, I present work by Hiro Ishikawa using a synthetic biology approach to test a length-sensing model based on diffusion of kinesin in flagella

Flagellar length control in Chlamydomonas is a paradigm for organelle size regulation. In poster 155 at the CellBio2025 meeting Sunday Dec 7, Ximena Garcia Arceo uses Lithium, which increases intraflagellar transport, as a tool to probe how length-altering mutants work.

And while you are checking out this poster you may also be interested in poster 347 by our collaborators Sam Silliman and Mo Das on a mathematical model for this phenomenon

The low Reynolds number of cytoplasmic flow which makes mixing hard. In poster 359 at the CellBio2025 meeting Sunday Dec 7, Ulises Diaz shows how giant cells leverage reversible actin gel assembly to drive rapid mixing of cytoplasm, faster even than "chaotic mixing" schemes.

Yeah we are too siloed into these separate communities!

Cells can hunt prey, solve mazes, and learn from past experience. Does this mean they can think, at some level? Find out more at our upcoming session on "Cell Behavior and Cognition" at the ASCB/EMBO #cellbio2025 meeting, Saturday 1-3 pm rm 115.

I dunno if that’s the case I don’t see why our trees are always so lopsided.

Reach out and touch somebody’s future organelle?

Make this place a better world, if you can.

My first ever time doing a podcast - part of “that’s absurd, please elaborate”, recorded live at the Bay Area Science Festival.

thatsabsurdshow.com

Discussing two topics- does saturable transport mean you can eat as much as you want? and what would happen if tardigrades were a lot bigger?

Check out that spindle 🤩🔥

At 63C, most eukaryotic cells would be busy exploding noisily, forget even trying to divide.

The microbial universe never ceases to astound 😍

Thanks for letting us be a tiny part of this! #ExpandThemAll

“You’re a stupid person” — Trump lashes out at a reporter who presses him on the fact that the suspected DC shooter was actually thoroughly vetted before he was let in the US from Afghanistan

Some cells are just in it for the drama!
The bottom 5 microns of cells videoed through a microscope by @EmmaKoory. The middle cell rounds up (for fun?) and subsequently rounds up to divide. We missed so much of the action by just sampling the bottom. @CellBiology

SEN. KELLY : “They informed me of this in a tweet because this is not about the law. This is about the media cycle, and intimidation… We basically repeated the uniform code of military justice, and they're saying that's in violation of it. It's absurd. Comical.”

but then it has me thinking that maybe I am missing some cases where there really is a deep and informative connection between two apparently different uses of the term.
for example I keep thinking that integral kernels seem to relate to mappings and so maybe to homomorphism kernels?

Weird word of the day: "kleptosquamy." The testate amoeba Awerintzewia cyclostoma steals scales from other amoeboid organisms to build its own shell. This one has robbed Quadrulella, Netzelia, various euglyphids, and even an Acanthocystis. Kleptosquamy! #amoebae #ProtistsOnSky #biology #nature

this is something I have always wondered about - are the different uses of "kernel" related in any way? i guess some are and some aren't?