Impressive experiments and - of course - beautiful imaging 😍

Just look at those microtubules go! Happy to see our paper out in JCS ✨

Time to get signed up for the Symposium on Structural Proteomics! This time at @humantechnopole.bsky.social in Milan 6th-8th October Full speaker lineup announced. Thanks to @thermofishersci.bsky.social @brukercorporation.bsky.social, Affipro and MSVision for support
Info
ssp2025.squarespace.com

Wow 😍 This is so impressive!

🥹

Of course team work makes the dream work and none of this would have been possible without Albert, Lukas, and two of my incredible Masters students, Noor and Bronte! 💜

But wait - did you spot the instances of stable microtubule orientation reversal in this cell?

We could even follow the fates of individual stable microtubules in these young neurons over the course of hours using StableMARK 😍

Remarkably, we found that stable microtubules are initially anchored at the centrioles and oriented plus-end-out in early neurites. They are then released from the centrioles, allowing them to reverse their polarity by sliding to adopt the minus-end-out orientation seen in mature dendrites.

And expansion microscopy let us precisely map the networks of acetylated (orange) and tyrosinated (blue) microtubules in these early neurites and near the centrioles!

Check it out for some beautiful super-resolution reconstructions of the microtubule networks in developing neurons! Using motor-PAINT, we can colour-code microtubules by their orientation to see how this changes during development. Cyan: plus-end-out (away from soma). Magenta: plus-end-in.

Polarity reversal of stable microtubules during neuronal development Neurons critically depend on long-distance transport orchestrated by motor proteins walking over their highly asymmetric microtubule cytoskeleton. These microtubules are organized uniformly in axons w...

My main PhD paper is on bioRxiv! 🥳 We used motor-PAINT, expansion microscopy, and live-cell imaging of StableMARK to map out how the microtubule cytoskeleton reorganizes during neuronal development.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

HT1080 cells with various morphologies. DAPI (blue) Phalloidin (grey) GM130 (green).

Advances in microscopy mean we can now do more than just observe biology—we can control it. But how far can we really push this in mammalian cells with all their (beautiful but annoying) heterogeneity? 🧪🔬(🧵)

And perfect timing to get newbie me all up-to-date 💫

Hi folks! Lots of things changed in my life recently (!) but mainly (1) I finished my PhD in the lab of Lukas Kapitein focusing on microtubule stability and orientation in neurons and (2) I moved to Milan to start my postdoc with Gaia Pigino on tubulin post-translational modifications in cilia.