Welcome Hervé :)

Fluidité intracellulaire et pouvoir infectieux du champignon Candida albicans Dans un article publié dans la revue Nature Microbiology, des scientifiques mettent en évidence un mécanisme jusque-là inconnu chez Candida albic

#ResultatScientifique🔎| Quand Candida albicans réduit ses ribosomes, ses cellules deviennent plus fluides, ce qui l’aide à changer de forme et à mieux infecter l’organisme 🍄
✍️ Robert Arkowitz
📕 @natmicrobiol.nature.com | buff.ly/zPSLael

Happy New Year! And happy to share our latest instrumentation work, led by fantastic Ines Muguet. Ines showed that sliding elements, developped by Ben Meriem et al, can be functionnalized to have electrodes, thus allowing reconfigurable electrochemistry-on-chip! Stay tuned, more preprints to come.

📢 New extended abstract submission deadline: 6 January 2026! Outstanding speaker list, plus many slots for short talks by students, postdocs, and junior PIs. Join us in March in Barcelona! events.ibecbarcelona.eu/embl-ibec-co...

Wonderful collaboration with @robertarkowitz.bsky.social et al! Fascinating result that inhibiting ribosome biogenesis triggers filamentation of C. albicans!

Now published in EPJE!

So much deserved, congrats Edouard!

Congrats Efe, well deserved!

New preprint from the lab, an old work from Z. Ben Meriem! We compress cells in 2D and show that proliferation and motility decrease. Crowding increases under pressure, which may explain this result. Interestingly, more mesenchymal cells seem to be more sensitive to pressure!
tinyurl.com/ybfu62yf

These effects are conserved from bacteria to fungi to mammalian cells, with specificities depending on the organism. Crowding seems central to the adaptation to confined growth, and the conserved structure of the cytoplasm might explain the conservation of the response under pressure.

When cells grow confined, they develop a growth-induced pressure with numerous physiological consequences. Concomitant to pressure development, cells become more crowded, which impacts a plethora of biochemical reactions and, in particular, biosynthesis.

I want to share three reviews on crowding and spatial confinement, active areas of research on our end:
- on the dynamic structure of the cytoplasm: tinyurl.com/4d6drhnv
- on the sensing of and response to crowding: tinyurl.com/959ht4fw
- on the effect of spatial confinement: tinyurl.com/nhh7sk9w

Happy to bring this to light!
The result of quite a few years and fabulous collaborations with wonderful colleagues! Thread from Antonio Serrano (@antonioserrano) coming soon!

Pre-announcing the EMBO/EMBL symposium "Mechanobiology Across the Tree of Life", Heidelberg, 9-12 June 2026. It is still very very far away, but save the date 🗓️. With Alba Diz-Munoz, @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social , Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social, Enrique Rojas.
www.embl.org/about/info/c...

🚨 Excited to share our new study on the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans! Thread 👇 (1/11)
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#Science #Microbiology #CellBiology

This work wouldn’t be possible without the incredible collaboration of wonderful colleagues.Thanks to Charles Puerner, Emily Plumb, Louis Chevalier, Johannes Elferich, Ludwig Sinn, Niko Grigorieff, Markus Ralser, @delarueresearch.bsky.social, Martine Bassilana and
@robertarkowitz.bsky.social (9/11)