How do cells convert mechanical information into a molecular process? The @alushinlab.bsky.social has captured the first snapshot of a mechanical signaling complex in action, findings in @nature.com that have implications for disorders related to myosin dysfunction.

🔗: https://bit.ly/41Kshjw

New preprint in which we built and simulated full-length models of α-Synuclein fibrils to reveal how the fuzzy coat mediates selective binding of peptides to amyloid fibrils

Work led by Carlos Pintado-Grima in a nice collaboration with Salvador Ventura's lab

doi.org/10.64898/202...

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...

Check out our new release on BioRxiv
co-lead by @pm-mueller.bsky.social

👉 rb.gy/lnrizk

special🙏 to
Severine Kunz #MDC
@leventallab.bsky.social
@andimicroscopy.bsky.social
@ewerslab.bsky.social and Kedar Narayan @NCI CCR VolumeEM

Are the days of discovering new cellular structures over?? /1

Just published in @science.org 🚀

By controlling how cells align, we show that living nematic tissues can be programmed to generate forces and fold into predictable 3D shapes.

A new platform for tissue engineering and the design of smart active materials! 🫆

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Tau-Mediated Cytoskeletal Stabilization Modulates Cell Mechanics and Vulnerability to Mechanical Strain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Collective #migration requires balancing force and flexibility. @vitoryang.bsky.social, @polarityi3s.bsky.social et al. identify RhoGAP15B as a local brake on RhoA-#myosin contractility in border cells, stabilizing front protrusions and coordinating group movement rupress.org/jcb/article/...

Important work by Hopkins colleagues Profs Sean Sun and Jude Philip on how microplastics affect gene expression and associated cell growth and motility in vitro and in vivo.

Read about it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

What if AI could invent enzymes that nature hasn’t seen? 👩‍🔬🧑‍🔬

Introducing 🪩 DISCO: Diffusion for Sequence-structure CO-design

📝 Blog: disco-design.github.io
📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.05181
💻 Code: github.com/DISCO-design...

I am excited to share our most recent work collaborating with @centriolelab.bsky.social and @stearnslab.bsky.social to look at the ciliary base of mammalian multiciliated cells w/ cryo-ET, XL/MS, and U-ExM www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Adaptive, Bayesian Experimental Design to Efficiently Determine the Critical Micelle Concentration of a Surfactant Surfactants are widely used for industrial applications, yet more environmentally friendly surfactants with enhanced properties are demanded. A key thermodynamic property governing the behavior of a surfactant in an aqueous solution is its critical micelle concentration (CMC). Below the CMC, increasing the surfactant concentration reduces the surface tension of the solution; above the CMC, the water–air interface becomes saturated with adsorbed surfactant, leading excess surfactant to self-assemble into micelles and the surface tension to plateau. Many physicochemical properties of a surfactant solution exhibit sharp changes at the CMC. The conventional experimental protocol to determine the CMC of a surfactant is labor-intensive and time-consuming: (1) prepare many surfactant solutions spanning a wide concentration range and then (2) measure the surface tension of each solution. Herein, we adopt Bayesian experimental design (BED) to determine the CMC of a surfactant more efficiently─even without prior knowledge of its order of magnitude. BED follows an experiment-model-design feedback loop: (1) prepare a surfactant solution and measure its surface tension; (2) use all surface tension data thus far to obtain a posterior distribution over thermodynamic models of the surface tension isotherm of the surfactant; and (3) pick the surfactant concentration for the next experiment to maximize expected information gain about the CMC. We show that BED efficiently gathers information about the CMC using two surfactants (octyl-β-d-thioglucopyranoside and Triton X-100) as test cases. Broadly, BED can reduce the time, effort, cost, and chemical waste to determine the CMC of surfactants and drive an autonomous laboratory for surfactant discovery and characterization.

check out our new paper on Bayesian experimental design for surfactant characterization!

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

How do active processes affect polymer conformations? I first began studying this question using linear response theory, and long thought that more general models could only be tackled with simulations. Turns out I was wrong: doi.org/10.48550/arX.... (1/8)
#active #chromatin #folding #biophysics

#ZebrafishZunday but make it Easter-themed? You got it! 🐟🥚 Cytoplasmic streaming inside of a zebrafish oocyte. Credit to @shamipourshayan.bsky.social & @heisenbergcplab.bsky.social 🔬🐟 🧪

@lsprahl.bsky.social and Ronald Canlla in the lab just published a detailed study on remote-controlled epithelial budding morphogenesis. We can direct budding, tubule elongation, and perhaps branching in human kidney organoids via a light-activated RET receptor.

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

I'm happy to share a recent study by @cathygalbraith.bsky.social & James Galbraith, along with @sciencethecat.bsky.social & myself. It challenges existing views on intracellular transportation… 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🥳 Excited to share our #diatom work out in @pnas.org. In a great collaboration with @nic-poulsen.bsky.social and @ulrichschwarz.bsky.social we show that diatoms modulate the curvature of their paths by dynamic switching of their cell–substrate contact sites.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2506122123

Pearling drives mitochondrial DNA nucleoid distribution The distribution of mitochondrial DNA–containing nucleoids is essential for mitochondrial function and genome inheritance; however, no known mechanisms can explain nucleoid segregation or their regula...

Pearling drives mitochondrial DNA nucleoid distribution | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Programmable macromolecule delivery via engineered trogocytosis - Nature Cell Biology Chen et al. engineer TRANSFER (trogocytosis-inspired receptor transfer and functional effector release), a method to deliver functional cargos from donor to recipient cells in a specific manner via di...

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

New paper from Kiemen and Wirtz groups.

Using a new workflow, we map the 3D spatial distribution of immune cells in the vicinity of precancerous lesions.

These maps reveals localized immune remodeling during early pancreatic cancer progression.

More here: www.cell.com/cell-press-b...

The new release of #BigVolumeBrowser (0.1.0) finally adds animation render functionality to it, plus some other navigation improvements and bug fixes.
Here is a movie I've made for the microtubule network (via ExM) in different cell types. Contact me if you want it for educational/research purposes.

Atharva Pandit, Fred C. MacKintosh, Abhinav Sharma: Strain-stiffening critical exponents of fiber networks under uniaxial deformation https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28397 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.28397 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.28397

New paper out 💥 3D cell-cell contact reconstitution with synthetic vesicles and (primary) immune cells to study how different proteins and carbohydrates influence the immune synapse dynamics.
advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Excited to share this collaborative work with Ward and Petrucelli Labs!

We show that two major genetic risk factors for #neurodegeneration and cognitive decline converge on TMEM106B fibrils accumulating within lysosomes.

A LOT of work packed in here 🧠🔬

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Since #durotaxis was described >25 years ago, most studies report cells migrating from soft → stiff

New work from my team at @ub.edu (in collaboration with D. Odde's lab) suggests we may have been missing the point all along...

🔥 Check out our new preprint here 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Deep-tissue absolute force spectroscopy with sub-piconewton precision www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social

We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked

What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective

We call it the digital sphinx

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

RoboCook: Long-Horizon Elasto-Plastic Object Manipulation with Diverse Tools Humans excel in complex long-horizon soft body manipulation tasks via flexible tool use: bread baking requires a knife to slice the dough and a rolling pin to flatten it. Often regarded as a hallmark ...

This week's #PaperILike is "RoboCook: Long-Horizon Elasto-Plastic Object Manipulation with Diverse Tools" (Shi et al., CoRL 2023).

So much to like in one paper: planning, learning, deformable manipulation, GNNs, 15 3D-printed tools, and dumplings!

PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2306.14447

Curvature of the Drosophila corneal lens depends on localized chitin secretion How does the corneal lens in the fly eye acquire its light-focusing shape? This study shows that centrally located cells produce large amounts of chitin to form the thick central corneal lens, while p...

I am excited to share my new paper in @plosbiology.org . Here we show the role of chitin, a polysaccharide, in controlling the shape of the fly corneal lens.

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Credit: Mylan Ansel

Expansion microscopy of a loricate choanoflagellate, generated by Mylan Ansel in our lab 🤩

(yes, the lorica expands. No, we don't understand how either)