Day 2 of the EMBO U-ExM Workshop at EMBL Heidelberg #EMBOExM. Gels are ready and expanding nicely! We also had a lively poster session and inspiring talks from @sabsalon.bsky.social and @gautamdey.bsky.social. A very engaged group, great to see such thoughtful discussions around expansion microscopy

"TRUST YOUR NERDS"

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)

Just watched The Thinking Game and loved it. A thoughtful, human look at the people behind AlphaFold—and a reminder of the responsibility we have as scientists using AI. Highly recommend watching and sharing.

Black graphic with a shape of a child's head filled with red dots to symbolize kids in ICE detention. White and red text reads "ICE has detained at least 3,800 children under the second Trump administration."

The average public school in the U.S. has 500 students. ICE is currently detaining over 7 schools' worth of children, many of whom are being held in inhumane conditions.

Children do not belong in government detention.

Rosalind Franklin and the damage of gender harassment Spurred by a recent report on sexual harassment in academia, our columnist revisits a historical case and reflects on what has changed—and what hasn’t

Thinking only of Rosalind Franklin today, and what was stolen from her (and so many other female scientists alongside her).

Applications are now accepted for UC San Diego Raising Advancement and Parity for Infectious Disease Researchers (RAPID) Program. RAPID is a one-year, NIAID-sponsored research development and mentoring program, which includes in-depth training in grant writing for research-oriented junior faculty. Apply by March 1, 2026 @ http://rapid.ucsd.edu. The graphic includes the program logo and a photo of an aerial view of La Jolla Cove.

Applications for UC San Diego RAPID program's 2026-27 cohort are now open! This highly-rated and effective career development opportunity is for junior faculty researchers in #InfectiousDiseases.

Learn more and apply today at rapid.ucsd.edu!

#UCSD_RAPID #FacultyDevelopment

A Somali Hospital Closed After U.S. Aid Cuts. Fired Employees Reopened It Without Pay.

Yet another starting example highlighting that countries and communities continue to suffer as foreign aid depletes, first with US cuts and then by other developed countries. Thanks for your relentless reporting on this topic @stephanienolen.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/h...

Jay Bhattacharya, MAGA world, corruption, & the politicization of science:

‼️🚨‼️He replaced the chief of the NIH’s environmental health institute with a dear friend of Vice President JD Vance without going through any of the usual NIH due processes

More on this ghastliness from @markhisted.org 👇

Second "No Kings Day" protests likely the largest single-day political demonstration since 1970, with 4.2-7.6 million participants Here are the initial results from our crowdsourced crowd-counting estimates

Good evening. We estimate that between 4.2 and 7.6 million people turned out for the No Kings Day demonstrations held around the country on Saturday. This makes Oct 18 very likely the biggest single-day U.S. protest event since 1970. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/second-no-...

University of Virginia Won’t Join White House’s Compact for Colleges It was the fifth school in a matter of days to refuse an offer of preferential funding treatment from the government, even as the White House has threatened schools that do not sign up.

The University of Virginia became the fifth school to rebuff a White House proposal to give universities preferential treatment if they uphold a set of government demands.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT📣: I haven’t been this excited to be part of something new in 15 years… Thrilled to reveal the passion project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half!🙀🥳 (thread 👇)

"Paper accepted in principle" is the best email to read while being in vacation with the inlaws in Brazil.

America’s brain drain

No words

An absolute diamond of cell biology work. Congratulations 🎉 to all authors #UExM #Parasitesrule #CellBiology #Cilia

Opinion | Six surgeons general: It’s our duty to warn the nation about RFK Jr. We took an oath to declare dangers when we found them. We’re doing that again today.

From the 6 Surgeon Generals who served across administrations since President Bush: "Secretary Kennedy is entitled to his views. But he is not entitled to put people’s health at risk. He has rejected science, misled the public and compromised the health of Americans."

Rutgers professor moving to Europe after threats over antifa accusations Mark Bray says threats intensified after a Turning Point USA petition accused him of promoting political violence

A Rutgers professor has been forced to flee the country for his safety, after targeting by a far-right student group that was *checks notes* claiming they felt unsafe.

I'm horrified.
I'm angry.

A short 🧵 #AcademicFreedom #Rutgers #violence #antifa

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Boa Constrictor Brain Cells Slither into Focus From reptiles and Tasmanian devils to humans, one researcher zooms in on unseen features of the brain and liver cells, like the cytoskeleton.

Our @viroscope.bsky.social Joe McKellar interviewed by The-Scientist Magazine ! Look at all these beautiful cells we have in the lab :)

The Microscopists | Christophe Leterrier (CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université) This time on The Microscopists, we're joined by Christophe Leterrier, team leader at NeuroCyto in Marseille and director of a Nikon Center of Excellence for super-resolution microscopy.Christophe r...

Happy #FluorescenceFriday. Christophe Leterrier⭐in #TheMicroscopists and reflects on the
make-or-break moment at the end of his postdoc
when he came close to leaving academia before securing his CNRS position
and how these experiences shape the way he mentors others.
Stream: bit.ly/microscopist...

Please visit @benliffner.bsky.social poster at #GEF25 to know more

Mosquito Tissue Ultrastructure-Expansion Microscopy (MoTissU-ExM) enables ultrastructural and anatomical analysis of malaria parasites and their mosquito - BMC Methods Background Study of malaria parasite cell biology is challenged by their small size, which can make visualisation of individual organelles difficult or impossible using conventional light microscopy. In recent years, the field has attempted to overcome this challenge through the application of ultrastructure expansion microscopy (U-ExM), which physically expands a biological sample approximately 4.5-fold. To date, U-ExM has mostly been used to visualise blood-stage parasites and used exclusively on parasites in vitro. Methods Here we develop Mosquito Tissue U-ExM (MoTissU-ExM), a method for preparing dissected mosquito salivary glands and midguts by U-ExM. MoTissU-ExM preserves both host and parasite ultrastructure, enabling visualisation of oocysts and sporozoites in situ. We also provide a point-by-point protocol for how to perform MoTissU-ExM. Results We validate that MoTissU-ExM samples expand as expected, provide a direct comparison of the same dissected tissues before and after MoTissU-ExM, and highlight some of the key host and parasite structures that can be visualised following MoTissU-ExM. Discussion We discuss potential use cases for MoTissU-ExM for study of malaria parasite biology, and more broadly. We detail drawbacks or challenges MoTissU-ExM and imaging these expanded tissues, along with information troubleshooting this technique. Finally, we discuss how MoTissU-ExM could be applied and adapted in future to increase its utility.

The Zeiss Objective C-Apo 40x/1.2 W Corr works beautifully for us and we even discussed it in our method paper for expansion microscopy on mosquito whole organs: MoTissU-ExM | BMC Methods | Full Text share.google/atZ9aoKRvw0U...

A divergent cyclic nucleotide binding protein promotes Plasmodium ookinete infection of the mosquito Author summary Malaria parasites complete their life-cycle within mammalian and mosquito hosts requiring specialised forms to invade and establish infection in host tissue. In order to transmit to the...

Delighted to report our publication on a divergent cyclic nucleotide binding protein that regulates malaria transmission to mosquitoes. Great work by Domi Kwecka , @jennyregan.bsky.social @choel Kim #malaria #ookinete #mosquitoes #signalling journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

woah this is genuinely, utterly WILD

Ant queens of one species produce males of another species, so she can then mate with them and produce hybrid workers!

This is so gloriously weird I can't quite compute it 🤯🧪🐜
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Whoever works with me knows how much I hate doing Western blots. Well today I feel the WB fairy helped me get the most beautiful sodium carbonate extraction samples analyzed with 6 antibodies, they all work amazingly and I have not a single bubble, dirt or weird running. Rebuttal paper looking good

I would love that and I can show the cool stuff we have on actin ;-)

Omaya your preprint made my day. Totally interesting any chance I will see you at ExM Gottingen?

Trouble imaging actin in ExM? Meet HAK-Actin, a probe for U-ExM, cryo-ExM & iU-ExM. Enables post-expansion labeling for max signal. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Soon at @spirochrome.com
Led by O.Mercey and @lreymond.bsky.social, in collab with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @marinelap.bsky.social

Dear Fly Community, In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled. The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC). Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options. To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum). To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase Our immediate goals are: 1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online 2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance). Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data. At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise. Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028. We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide. Sincerely, The FlyBase Team

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

At the top of my to do read

Conserved nucleocytoplasmic density homeostasis drives cellular organization across eukaryotes Nature Communications - Cells can regulate their mass density. Here, the authors demonstrate how eukaryotes establish and maintain a lower density in the nucleus than in the cytoplasm via pressure...

FINALLY! Challenging to publish but we believe it is an important discovery: rdcu.be/eATFz

💚 Thanks to the team ‪@biswashere.bsky.social‬, Omar Muñoz, ✨Q✨ C. Hoege, B. Lorton, R. Nikolay ‪@matthewkraushar.bsky.social‬ @dshechter.bsky.social @gucklab.bsky.social @vasilyzaburdaev.bsky.social‬ 💚