A photo of a young Lilian Vaughan Morgan, sitting with a book on her lab staring into the distance.

A photo of an older Lilian Vaughan Morgan, sitting at a lab bench with a microscope and dozens of glass milk bottles bunged with cotton. Lilian is in the middle of applying ether to anaesthetize a bottle of flies.

This #InternationalWomensDay I want to tell the story of Lilian Vaughan Morgan. I learned of Lilian this past year - what a badass.

Lilian was a leading scientist when women weren't welcome in the lab, nor even the department. But she contributed immensely to the genetics of sex determination

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🪰🔬 Thrilled to share our latest article on Drosophila innate immunity and gut-immune interactions! Grateful for the team's hard work and excited for your thoughts! #DrosophilaResearch #InnateImmunity #GutImmuneAxis

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

Proud of two covers from India this year in JCB....both so beautiful, @rpadinjat.bsky.social and @spindlebehavior.bsky.social

Our first lab preprint — feeling like a very proud mentor today!

6/n After an injury, hemocytes migrate to the gut and remain there for several days, a response that relies on hemocyte Upd3. Their presence is critical for epithelial defense—flies lacking hemocyte Upd3 fail to mount this protective response and succumb to what would normally be a benign infection.

5/n Following injury, chronic JAK–STAT activity persisted in enterocytes and visceral muscle for ~10 days. 10xSTAT-GFP data showed that this sustained signaling required hemocyte Upd3, establishing a long-term Upd3→STAT axis in the gut epithelium.

4/n Injury triggers gut proliferation via hemocyte Upd3. This regenerative wave is lost in Hml>Upd3 RNAi flies, leading to premature gut aging with epithelial hyperplasia and excess enterocytes. Hemocyte Upd3 is thus essential for balanced epithelial renewal post-injury.

3/n The loss of Upd3 in hemocytes compromises gut barrier integrity after thoracic injury. Flies with reduced hemocyte Upd3 showed blue dye leakage into the body cavity after injury, indicating epithelial barrier failure. Thus, hemocyte Upd3 is essential for gut integrity after distant wounding.

2/n To examine how a local wound influences distant organs, we used a simple injury model — a prick to the thorax of adult Drosophila.
We study the communication between the wound site and other tissues, and hemocytes relay systemic signals that preserve epithelial integrity beyond the injury site.

1/n Fly blood cells sense injury through reactive oxygen signals and release the cytokine Upd3, which activates JAK–STAT signaling in the gut to reinforce its barrier, balance cell turnover, and prevent lethal leakage.

A single wound, a whole-body survival plan.

“When one organ is wounded, how does the rest of the body know to protect itself?”
We explored exactly this question in our latest preprint 👇

🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#Preprint #JAKSTAT #Regeneration #Drosophila #ImmuneSignaling #GutHomeostasis

**Attention fly enthusiasts!** We're looking for presenters for the Dipterists Society General Meeting at ESA @entsocamerica.bsky.social in Portland, OR (November 11th)

If you're interested in giving a talk, please DM me for a link to submit a title/abstract. Deadline to submit is October 10th.

Happy to share our work in @embojournal 👉 shorturl.at/zXNyn
For decades, we’ve known cells dismantle & rebuild the nuclear envelope in sync with spindle poles. But why does this coordination matter? And how do pole material properties ensure error-free division?
Follow this thread to know more 👇

The Plain Truth About Vaccines and Autism We respect families not by perpetuating recycled myths, but by pursuing real science and better care.

Vaccines save lives. There is no credible evidence that they cause autism.

Pretending otherwise hurts kids twice – by undermining trust in vaccines, and by distracting from the urgent need to understand and address autism itself.

A laptop sits on a table and the screen reads the following: Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega Professor, Methods Lab Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) Mexico raul.pacheco-vega@flacso.edu.mx https://www.raulpacheco.org/blog Developing and Sustaining Your Academic Writing Practice The University of British Columbia Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies July 24h, 2025 Hosts: Pathways to Graduate Success (Anjali Bauri, Jacqui Brinkman)

Attended an inspiring workshop on “Developing & Sustaining Your Academic Writing Practice” with @raulpachecovega.bsky.social ✏️
Full of practical tips, resources, and insight. Feeling motivated to write for once and to keep writing! 😄
#PhDLife #WritingSky #AcademicSky

Happy to have contributed to these important papers

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

A 🧵 1/n

The cover of @jcb.org's July issue (rupress.org/jcb/issue/22...) shows a confocal timelapse imaging of #Celegans one-cell embryo expressing fluorescently labeled plasma membrane, microtubules, chromosomes, and ZEN-4, a plus-end directed kinesin motor protein (Adhikary et al. doi.org/10.1083/jcb....)

Volume 224 Issue 7 | Journal of Cell Biology | Rockefeller University Press Journal of Cell Biology (JCB) publishes advances in any area of basic cell biology as well as applied cellular advances in fields such as immunology, neurobiology, metabolism, microbiology, developmen...

JCB July cover (hubs.la/Q03vJ8s50) shows a confocal timelapse imaging of #Celegans one-cell embryo expressing fluorescently labeled plasma membrane, microtubules, chromosomes, and ZEN-4, a plus-end directed kinesin motor protein (hubs.la/Q03vJ8yc0). #SachinKotak lab

Congrats to your team Helena

Pathogen infection alters the gene expression landscape of transposable elements in Drosophila melanogaster Abstract. Transposable elements make up substantial proportions of eukaryotic genomes and many are thought to be remnants of ancient viral infections. Curr

Mostoufi, S. L., Singh, N. D. (2024)s. Pathogen infection alters the gene expression landscape of transposable elements in #Drosophila melanogaster. G3 (Bethesda), 14(9) academic.oup.com/g3journal/ar...

🧬 Grateful to see our lab’s work featured by @India_Alliance in their Stories of Science!
We use Drosophila to study how injury in one organ triggers immune/regenerative responses in another, via inter-organ communication.
Honoured to share our story!
www.indiaalliance.org/stories_of_s...

We are #hiring! Interested in comparative neuroscience? Check details here (www.unifr.ch/bio/en/depar...). We look for a motivated #PhD student or #PostDoc to combine genetics, physiology, neural circuit tracing, and behaviour to study taste processing evolution in #Drosophila. Please repost.

Thanks to DBT/WT India Alliance for their support over the years and enabling me to have such an awesome mentor like @irenemiguel-aliaga.bsky.social

www.indiaalliance.org/news/idwgs_s...

Lab’s latest: (mouse) mums grow their guts during pregnancy and lactation: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

I had the pleasure to host Professor Martin Lowe, a leading cell biologist from The University of Manchester, at MIRM, MAHE- Bengaluru. His research has significantly advanced the understanding of vesicle transport, Golgi function, and intracellular trafficking. Our students esp enjoyed his visit!

Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) - Montréal, Quebec (CA) job with University of Montreal (UdeM) | 12838461 Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC)

Fantastic opportunity if you are interested in moving your lab to Montreal, Canada! Through this program, Chairholders will be awarded up to $1 million per year for a period of 8 years.

Contact me if you are interested.

www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Some Marine Cell Biology for you. Migrating cell in #ascidian (Phallusia). Cell leaves (delaminates) the neural tube and migrates towards anterior end (upper left) of forming tadpole. Thanks to AscidianBioCell team and Alberto Stolfi for the lineage-specific marker of this cell.

Open Positions -

We are recruiting one postdoc and one PhD student to join our lab on #Drosophila #innate immunity in Lausanne (Switzerland). More info: www.epfl.ch/labs/lemaitr...

All interested PhD students please apply!