What if you got to work with some of your best friends on a science project? I can't publish how fun this was, but I can show you the data (🧵)! Last week, we posted our second neutrophil swarming paper to bioRxiv and I wanted to post my favorite videos here~
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Now published. Congrats to Soham and all co-authors! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/....
@embl.org

A press release on our latest work on shape diversity in cnidarians. @embl.org

Our study on shape diversity in cnidarians is now published. The final version includes extensive new data that substantially extend the original bioRxiv preprint. Congrats to everyone who contributed to this work! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
@embl.org

Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues and Organs | Quanta Magazine Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can later withstand immense forces.

Sometimes, the only way to build back up is to let everything fall apart. This is certainly true at the cellular level. www.quantamagazine.org/break-it-to-...

#LivingArchitectures
We put cells and cytoskeleton filaments on the architecture of the musée d'Orsay.
www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/agenda/ev...
Scientists of the #CytoMorphoLab adapted their protocols to illustrate the questions that keep them awake at night.
-> Two shows on the 24th and 25th of January.

Two heads are better than one, unless you’re a land planarian trying to find some grub. FORCE pilot project - check!

Video credit: Daniel Stoga

#nightscience
#WormWednesday
@hanhtkvu.bsky.social
@aikmi.bsky.social @embldbunit.bsky.social
@martaalvarez.bsky.social

New preprint! Do you like ocean waves? We found similar waves on bacterial colonies! We found that this collective behavior, known as rippling, is nothing but surface waves on an active nematic. @princeton.edu @mpipks.bsky.social @ub.edu @icreacommunity.bsky.social

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

New preprint 🥳! We made photoclickable HaloTag ligands to precisely control protein labeling on living cells. With it, we can do some cool multicolor stuff. Huge congrats to Franzi and all co-authors! Check it out 👇

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

How to swap the foot for a tentacle and vice versa? Find out in our new story featured in @dev-journal.bsky.social uncovering a transcription factor toggle switch behind the identity of Hydra's extremities.

🚨 New paper out in @pnas.org! 🚨

We show that self-generated gradients allow heterogeneous cell mixtures to co-migrate efficiently over long distances —while optimizing their physical interactions!

(See below for 🧵)

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧪

Spent a memorable summer at Physiology course at @mblscience.bsky.social Very coooool science with some lovely people! Thanks @brangwynnelab.bsky.social and @gladfelterlab.bsky.social for being amazinnnng course coordinators! 🧵

1/27 We have a new paper out! Turns out that snowflake yeast have been hiding a secret from us - they've evolved a (very!) crude circulatory system. Not with blood vessels or a heart, but through spontaneous fluid flows powered by their metabolism. 🧪🔬

www.science.org/doi/full/10....

🔔 Proud to share the preprint of my PhD work in the Petridou group @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social @embl.org ✨

“A closed feedback between tissue phase transitions and morphogen gradients drives patterning dynamics” 🐟 🔁 📶

🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#devbio #biophysics

🧵⤵️

In preprints: an evo-devo approach integrates multicellular shape diversity and active surface mechanics D'Arcy Thompson postulated in his seminal work that biological shape diversity is revealing of the physical forces driving it (Thompson, 1917). Indeed, developmental tissue deformations require mechan...

@richardbailleul.bsky.social @aikmi.bsky.social

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

We may not have really squared the circle — but we came close! 😉 In our @NaturePhysics paper w/ @fakhrilab.bsky.social, light-triggered membrane excitability enables programmable shapes — a step toward engineering living matter.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#biophysics #syntheticcell #softmatter

🎉 Excited to share our new work: “Adhesion-driven tissue rigidification triggers epithelial cell polarity”, now on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social !

A huge thank you to @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social, Bernat, @crisp-c.bsky.social, Adrián, and everyone involved! 🙌

🧵⤵️

Very cool!!
@alexandrepaix83.bsky.social @jordivangestel.bsky.social

I am very happy to share that my work on active deformations of lipid vesicles is finally out in Nature Physics. A nicer thread+movies coming soon, in the meantime:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thx to Andreas, Hammad, Dmitry, Gerhard @laynefrechette.bsky.social and everybody else who contributed!

There are days in life that shake you.

I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University
& academic career... 1/🧵

As the world of science wakes up to modern fascism, it's worth remembering older generations who stood up for humanity in much harsher circumstances. Jacques Monod worked actively for the resistance in WWII, while pursuing early stages of his research in occupied Paris. @standupforscifr.bsky.social

New preprint out 🔥🔥 on my postdoc work with @manuelthery.bsky.social and @lblanchoin.bsky.social about how we can create sustained dynamic steady states of actin network inside microscopic wells that contract "forever" without collapsing! A thread 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Willy Brandt playing a mandolin (1976). Some history (in German): https://www.geo.de/wissen/weltgeschichte/ein-bild-und-seine-geschichte--willy-brandt-mit-der-mandoline-34422658.html

In anticipation/angst for the coming German election, thinking of finally buying a mandolin

Should biology put complexity first? The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing damage to its complex nature? The answer might be foun...

Well well, timely! 😉
www.cell.com/cell-systems...

Improvements in LM (top) and EM (bottom) of our micro-sam model (finetuned) compared to the default SAM model.

After a long journey, Segment Anything for Microscopy is now published in Nature Methods! We significantly improve SAM for interactive and automatic segmentation in light and electron microscopy and build a user-friendly tool.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔬🎤 As pre-announced a few days ago... please let us proudly present to you: 𝑴𝒊𝒄𝒓𝒐𝕊𝒑𝒍𝒊𝒕 - your ticket to imaging more, imaging more gentle, and/or imaging more efficient. 🔬

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Like ❤️, repost 🔂, and most importantly... please send feedback ✉️ our way! 🙏

Scientific institutions have a long history of anticipatory obedience Societies should learn from this and speak up to support inclusion

I have run out of patience with the apparent silence of most US science institutions (and not just US) in the face of Trump & Musk's rampage. There are of so many facets of that, but in this column for @chemistryworld.com I talk about the assaults on inclusion.
www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/scie...

A toolkit for testing membrane localisation tags across species Transgenic markers and tools have revolutionised how we study cells and developing organisms. Some of the elements needed to construct those tools are universally applicable (e.g. fluorescent proteins...

Looking for a tag to localise fluorescent proteins to the plasma membrane? Unsure which tag might work in your species? We generated a toolkit of 11 membrane-localising tags, which can be screened rapidly by microinjecting mRNA in your species of interest. 1/4
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...