Arachidonic acid availability controls neutrophil swarm initiation and scaling
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Emerging roles of lipids in nuclear function and homeostasis Summary: Lipids are increasingly recognized as essential regulators of nuclear homeostasis, membrane dynamics, mechanotransduction and genome stability, opening new frontiers for understanding nuclear...

Emerging roles of lipids in nuclear function and homeostasis url: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article-...

A quantity is a quality that has become representative for the magnitude of its cause. Henri Bergson - Time and free will.

Check out 2 papers and a related Perspective on tissue regeneration in @science.org this week
Species-specific oxygen sensing governs the initiation of vertebrate limb regeneration | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Left: Time-lapse images of cells subjected to (top) 0–10 nM C5a with cell tracks, (bottom) 0–10 nM C5a in the presence of 10 μM PMX-53 (inhibitor), Right: Spider plots for 0–10 nM C5a (top), and 0–10 nM C5a in the presence of 10 μM PMX-53 (bottom).

#Macrophages don't simply follow cues to locate sites of infection. @robinsall.bsky.social &co show that they extract directional information from their environment from a constant concentration of C5a #chemoattractant, self-generate a gradient & enhance guidance @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4txkZez

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech, but thus far, it has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. In this work, we show that bumble bees also form ...

What a coincidence! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Zebrafish finds Nemo. New paper with our great collaborators on gap junctional communication in widely divergent species.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If amusia (i.e., the opposite of "musia"?) is hereditary, the question arises whether musia, being then likewise hereditary, emerged for some unknown selective pressure, or just to amuse? 🤷‍♂️

😶

The Genetics of Congenital Amusia (Tone Deafness): A Family-Aggregation Study Congenital amusia (commonly known as “tone deafness”) is a lifelong impairment of music perception that affects 4% of the population. To estimate whether congenital amusia can be genetically transmitt...

The Genetics of Congenital Amusia (Tone Deafness): A Family-Aggregation Study: The American Journal of Human Genetics www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

Blood vessel-resident macrophages safeguard blood and vessel integrity in zebrafish - Nature Immunology Robin and colleagues describe a population of blood vessel-resident macrophages that function within the vasculature to maintain vascular and blood homeostasis in zebrafish and identify a conserved po...

Really cool #zebrafish paper 🧪 from Bart Weijts & Catherine Robin (Hubrecht): starts with the basic question of are those superbright kdrl/fli1a positive cells (that we've all seen in the vascular Tg lines) something special? Yes! They're lumenal macrophages

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multiomic profiling reveals that prostaglandin E2 reverses aged muscle stem cell dysfunction, leading to increased regeneration and strength Repair of muscle damage declines with age due to the accumulation of dysfunctional muscle stem cells (MuSCs). Here, we uncover that aged MuSCs have bl…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

„Do not look around at the directing minds of other people, but keep looking straight ahead to where nature is leading you“ (Meditations, Marc Aurel, ~175 AD)

The end of the genetic paradigm of cancer Genome sequencing results and single-cell transcriptomics continue to produce findings that challenge the idea that cancer is purely a ‘genetic disease’. This Essay delves into cancer omics data that ...

Looking forward to Carlos Sonnenschein's talk at RU next week! dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

These few have moved mountains last year - so grateful to have them!

Looking forward to it!

European Phagocyte Workshop 2026 in Oxford. Lovely talks/posters and Hogwarts-like setting at Keble College ❤️.

Model organisms are often used without fully understanding the implications of these and other evolutionary adaptations on the predictive power for human pathophysiology. Closing this gap requires more basic research into model organisms, not less.

Modulating vertebrate physiology by genomic fine-tuning of GPCR functions | Physiological Reviews | American Physiological Society G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play a crucial role as membrane receptors, facilitating the communication of eukaryotic species with their environment and regulating cellular and organ interactions. Consequently, GPCRs hold immense potential in contributing to adaptation to ecological niches and responding to environmental shifts. Comparative analyses of vertebrate genomes reveal patterns of GPCR gene loss, expansion, and signatures of selection. Integrating these genomic data with insights from functional analyses of gene variants enables the interpretation of genotype-phenotype correlations. This review underscores the involvement of GPCRs in adaptive processes, presenting numerous examples of how alterations in GPCR functionality influence vertebrate physiology or, conversely, how environmental changes impact GPCR functions. The findings demonstrate that modifications in GPCR function contribute to adapting to aquatic, arid, and nocturnal habitats, influencing camouflage strategies, and specializing in particular dietary preferences. Furthermore, the adaptability of GPCR functions provides an effective mechanism in facilitating past, recent, or ongoing adaptations in animal domestication and human evolution and should be considered in therapeutic strategies and drug development.

GPCR evolution is a particularly senstive to changes in environmental pressures. But when a GPCR pathway is lost and not just replaced, the metabolic network that generate its ligands, presumably, must rewire, too. journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

Small molecules as products of evolution The functional evolution of ancient proteins has recently been reconstructed using molecular phylogeny, and the activity of the deduced molecules can …

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Evolution of substrate specificity in a retained enzyme driven by gene loss An integrated biochemical and evolutionary analysis shows how enzyme specificity evolves after gene loss during genome decay, implicating relaxation of purifying selection as a driving force for functional divergence.

Intruiging!
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Unstructured transcription factor interactions enable emergent specificity How intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) influence chromatin binding and nuclear organization of transcription factors (TFs) remains unclear. We employed proximity-assisted photoactivation (PAPA), ...

Unstructured transcription factor interactions enable emergent specificity | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

To learn how cells function, one must study cells. To learn how organoids function, one must study organoids. To learn how computer simulations of cells/organism work, one studies those computer simulations. To understand how organisms work, one must study living organisms. Timeless logic.

I hope some brilliant mind steps forward soon telling us how biological systems are better conceptualized than with an engeneering metaphor. Just novel ways of mathematical formalization (category theory, etc.), i.e., without better predictions may not suffice - but what do I know...

Episode 6 - Justinus Kerner and the first Botulism Outbreak (1793) | Pioneers of Plastic Surgery YouTube video by Aesthetic Minutes

"...Kerner predicted that the deadly agent (botox) could have numerous possible therapeutic applications if used in small doses." Of course, my 4xgrand-pa did not act on it. Now I fear that lack of interest in monetizing science might be a family trait 😶. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GopT...

…and engineers like to build machines.

Rethinking Life: Beyond the Machine Metaphor YouTube video by Marginalia Review of Books

I had a great talk with philosopher of biology Dan Nicholson, for the New Biology project with Marginalia Review of Books, about going beyond the machine metaphor in biology.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ds0...

“i only understand what I can build” - who said that? If building is essential for scientific understanding (is it?), all scientists are engineers.

How does a cell move when it carries cargo larger than its own organelles?

Excited to share our findings: cells can mechanoadapt their force architecture to move oversized cargo

Watch the bulky parasite (red) within an immune cell squeezing through a tiny pore

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

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Have you ever wondered 🤔... Does phenotypic variance respond to environmental perturbation? Does it have a genetic basis? Are mean and variance regulating loci exposed to different selection pressures? These and more questions are explored in our new preprint 🔥

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...