The anatomical landscape of a zebrafish tail 🔬🐟

🔵 Nuclei: Hundreds of individuals in a dense tissular landscape.
🟠 Microtubules: Notice the axonal structural repeats!

Want your science/tech to be highlighted? Reach out to me !

#SciArt #Zebrafish

If a cyberpunk metropolis was engineered by biology, it’d look like this.

🔵 Actin: neon structural cables
🟣 MX1: localized defense matrix
🟠 DNA: reactor cores

Want your science/tech to look like a movie poster? Reach out to me! 🔬

#SciArt #FluorescenceFriday

Thanks! This is fluorescence confocal microscopy using a spinning disk microscope :)

Tracking the rapid recycling pathways of a living cell.

This time-lapse captures an A549 lung cell expressing GFP-Rab11a.
These fast-moving puncta are recycling endosomes, tirelessly shuttling sorted cargo back out to the plasma membrane.
Check out the tubulations also!

#SciArt #LiveCellImaging

Cellular Liquid Gold 🔬

This time-lapse shows an A549 cell over-expressing Sec61B, outlining the Endoplasmic Reticulum. Imaged at 1 frame per 500ms, it reveals just how violently active our cellular infrastructure really is!

What is your favorite organelle to image? 👇

#SciArt #FluorescenceFriday

Mapping active herpesvirus replication inside human neurons 🧠🔬

A max intensity projection of HSV-1 infecting LUHMES cells.
🔵 Actin: The dense structural network.
🔴 HSV-1: Hotspots of active viral replication.

Infections are undesirable, but beautiful!

#sciart #virology

Kudos to @nadinelaguette.bsky.social team and all co-authors on this nice paper where our lab had a modest contribution! @viroscope.bsky.social 🔥

Thrilled to share that the French journal "Virologie" has chosen my work as the official 2026 cover!🔬

➡️To see the original black-and-white capture. It shows primary boa constrictor brain cells infected for 1h with VSV.

Thank you to @sfvirologie.bsky.social and @sebnisole.bsky.social !

#SciArt

BPoD | Hep D Hitcher Hep D Hitcher - Biomedical pictures for March 2026.

Hepatitis D virus hitches a ride into host cells inside a helper virus such as hep B acting as a Trojan horse

📹 @viroscope.bsky.social et al @karimaj.bsky.social lab @umontpellier.bsky.social in @cellpress.bsky.social
➡️ bpod.org.uk/archive/2026...

Imaged with a @zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social LSM980 + Airyscan 2.

A solar flare erupting on a glass coverslip ☀️🔬

This mouse cell has broken symmetry, erupting to drive itself across the surface.

🧡 Actin: Sweeping golden kinetic energy
🩵 Septin 7: Swirling membrane regulation
🩷 Lipids: Burning metabolic fuel
💙 DNA: The anchored core

#SciArt #FluorescenceFriday

🔬 Imaged with a @zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social LSM980 + Airyscan 2 confocal microscope.

Glimpse of an alien shoreline.

Not a topographical map of a distant planet, but the extreme boundary of a fibroblast cell!

🟣 Actin: Structural cables
🟢 Septin 7: Dynamic scaffolding
🔵 Lipids: Metabolic fuel pools

An entire universe of complexity right under the objective lens.

#SciArt

Deltaviruses spread through a viral Trojan Horse Hepatitis D-like satellite viruses, known as deltaviruses, have been recently discovered in a wide range of animals. These viruses are thought to expr…

Here is the link to the published paper! There is a lot more data compared to the preprint. Some cool cryo-ET visualization of the Trojan Horse particles and production in post-mortem human brain tissue to name two 😄
Let me know what you think of it!

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

🦠 Quand un virus devient cheval de Troie
🔬 Cette découverte éclaire la transmission et l’évolution des deltavirus.
👉 www.insb.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/...
👏 @karimaj.bsky.social @viroscope.bsky.social @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social @umontpellier.bsky.social

#IGMM #CNRS #Virologie #Recherche

Deltaviruses spread through a viral Trojan Horse Hepatitis D-like satellite viruses, known as deltaviruses, have been recently discovered in a wide range of animals. These viruses are thought to expr…

We found a viral Trojan Horse: a virus can hide inside another virus.This one surprised us: deltaviruses don’t just borrow a helper virus. They can travel inside it.
A literal Trojan Horse “virus-in-a-virus” route into cells. 🤯 Kudos to 1st author @viroscope.bsky.social and co-authors !

Deltaviruses spread through a viral Trojan Horse McKellar et al. have discovered that some satellite viruses act as the ultimate hitchhikers. They physically become a virus inside a virus, hiding within helper virus particles by hitching a ride as a Trojan Horse and sneaking into new animal species and organs they could not reach alone, including the human brain.

Now online! Deltaviruses spread through a viral Trojan Horse

We threw the kitchen sink and more at these viruses! 🔬

Go check out the whole manuscript and discover some cool microscopy techniques applied on single viral particles!

Special thanks to Aurélien Fouillen, who was there since the initial observations and who was essential for all the EM data of the paper, and of course @karimaj.bsky.social, who was extremely supportive in my pursual of what was originally an anecdotal, unexpected, observation!

I would like to thank everyone involved in this project, for their expertise, their ideas and their enthusiasm!

To conclude, we evidence a novel mode of viral transmission: spread through a viral Trojan Horse. This opens up many questions, as to whether deltaviruses may be causative agents of disease in humans, and whether deltaviruses can host-shift by hitchhiking with new helper viruses.

We could show by electron microscopy and STED that primary boa constrictor cells replicating SDeV and superinfected with the UGV-1 reptarenavirus produced Trojan Horse particles.

Finally, while VSV and HSV-1 have never been shown to associate with deltaviruses in nature, we turned to the snake deltavirus (SDeV) and its association with reptarenaviruses with Jussi Hepojoki.

Furthermore, we show the tissue- and species-shifting capabilities that Trojan Horse particles allow, by showing infection of human neuronal cells with HSV-1 Trojan Horse particles! Neuronal marker in 🟣 HSV-1 in 🟡, deltavirus in 🔵 and DNA in ⚪.

These HSV-1-RDeV Trojan Horse particles were infectious, and we could see both HSV-1 and RDeV replication over time.

We next showed that this mode of viral transmission is not limited to Rhabdoviruses, as we could also see deltaviruses inside of Herpes Simplex Virus 1 (HSV-1)!

We showed that these viruses could infect cells, allowing for concomitant entry of both VSV and RDeV into the same cell!
We therefore called these hybrid particles “Trojan Horse” particles, reminiscent of the classical Greek story!

A real virus-inside-a-virus!

To understand if the RDeV vRNP was actually found inside of the VSV particle, we performed cryo-ET with the Irina Gutsche lab, and showed that a single continuous viral membrane surrounded these dual particles!

Using post-mortem human brain explants with @jvirolb.bsky.social and @gaudinlab.bsky.social, we could instigate RDeV replication within neural cells and show that upon VSV infection, these dual particles could be formed!
Neurons in 🟢, vessels in🟣 DNA in 🟡 and deltavirus in 🔵.