Excited to share our latest! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... This was a highly collaborative endeavor– the best way to do science. We asked how a developing tissue achieves the right shape despite all the variability along the way. Short answer: Hydrostatic pressure. Read on for the long answer!

Hosting my PhD mentor, @thomaslecuit.bsky.social was a welcome reminder of how fortunate I am to do what I do. It was a privilege to host him at Duke and reflect on what good mentorship can build. Thank you for coming, sharing your inspiring science, and for your unwavering support.

Thomas Lecuit@thomaslecuit.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Visiting Duke Univ. yesterday. What a treat to be hosted by @akankshi.bsky.social Munjal (former PhD std) 🤩 and spending time with fantastic trainees & wonderful faculty, such as Stefano di Talia @ditalialab.bsky.social. Many thanks for the invitation 🙏🏼. A place full of talent & energy.

How do sperm and egg fuse? Surprisingly, we still don’t fully know… Our field has uncovered many pieces of the fertilization puzzle, but not how they fit together. We identify ✨ SPARK ✨ - a conserved sperm complex that couples sperm-egg binding to fusion. tinyurl.com/34cm4xat Read on! 🧵👇

🐟!JOB ALERT!Duke, Durham, NC!🐟 We are looking for a research tech (our current tech is starting grad school this Fall (Yay!)). The candidate will contribute to our ongoing research projects on tissue morphogenesis using zebrafish. Please RT🙏 www.munjallab.com/join-us

New piece on the mechanics of squamous epithelial shape transition highlighting the role of tensile forces, force transmission by Dumpy & elastic resistance by the ECM in the developing wing. Terrific work from Stefan Harmansa @morphomechanics.bsky.social with Alex Erlich🍾👏: tinyurl.com/2p58b3w3

1/ 🚀 Excited to release: napari-mcp - agentic control of napari from any MCP-capable AI assistant! Use it for interactive image processing, analysis, and visualisation! Really cool project from @ilan-theodoro.bsky.social from my team! #napari #bioimageanalysis #MCP @biohub

Briefly, after organ injury, 100 milliseconds, we detected collective changes in membrane potential at the tissue level. This is so far the earliest detected wound-response!! This electric signal sparks the formation of a tissue-wide calcium wave👇

Youthful antics predict lifespan? Using machine learning & continuous recordings of #killifish behavior from adolescence until death, @brunetlab.bsky.social & @deisseroth.bsky.social find early-life behavior predicted future lifespan! Now published @science.org: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪 1/2

Wonderful to be part of exciting Program at Harvard University & CMSA, Mathematics &Biology: Morphometry, Morphogenesis and Mathematics. Thank you 🙏🏼 and congrats to organizers for their invitation. Great to see and discuss with wonderful colleagues, not least @akankshi.bsky.social! 🤩

Amazing work by amazing colleagues!

Yarui Diao@yaruidiao.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Happy to share scHiCAR, an ultra-high throughout (millions of cells), low cost (5 cents/cell including NGS), and trimodal platform for integrated single-cell level analysis of mRNA, open chromatin, and 5-kb resolution looping with ground-truth data the same individual cell.

I’m thrilled to share the first preprint from the Piacentino Lab @hopkinsmedicine.bsky.social! We show that developing inner ear requires a secreted lipid chaperone, APOD, working in a positive feedback loop to amplify FGF/MAPK signaling. 👂 #DevBio Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Lipid-mediated reinforcement of FGF/MAPK signaling enables robust otic placode specification

The formation of cranial placodes requires groups of ectodermal cells to interpret inductive signals in a robust and organized manner, yet how signaling responses are coordinated across a developing f...

biorxiv.org

Excited to share Alison's @alisonkickuth.bsky.social paper from the lab out in @nature.com this week! We uncovered how a mechanical ratchet mechanism drives cytokinesis in early #zebrafish embryos. Read more in this thread 🧵 and at www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩 @poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de

Advanced grad students + postdocs: apply for the 2026 #kitpqbio summer course, "Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals," at buff.ly/OXXMKEv. Apply by Feb. 1. Course directors Adrienne Roeder (Cornell) and Sebastian Streichan (UCSB)

SAVE THE DATE! Stoked to organize the 2026 Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting with @rashmi-priya.bsky.social, @lowelab.bsky.social, and Shelbi Russell. Come learn about Biomedicine, Biomechanics, and the Biosphere, August 24-28, 2026. Registration dates, etc., coming soon! Please RT

Part 6: For decades, the zebrafish has helped scientists unlock the mysteries of genetics, development, & disease. But the fish that power most discoveries have spent generations inside lab tanks. This video captures footage of zebrafish in their natural environment in Nepal. youtu.be/cCZhZpPALqw

Zebrafish in the wild

YouTube video by John Rawls

youtu.be

Join us in one of the most supportive and collaborative departments, led by an equally supportive chair!

Scott Soderling@scottsoderling.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Please repost!!: We are searching for new AI-Bio faculty at Duke to be part of a new Discovery AI center. Looking for faculty who focus on pushing boundaries in ML model development in a highly interactive environment. DEADLINE for applications- Nov 1st!! www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Excited to start my first day as a postdoc in @akankshi.bsky.social's lab! Seeking to understand quantitatively how a living organism can reproducibly form a complex topological structure from simple initial conditions, and what implications this may have for its behavioral function.

I’m thrilled to share my postdoc work and the first paper from the McKinley Lab! 🎉 @karalmckinley.bsky.social We built the first transgenic model of menstruation in mice. We used it to uncover how the endometrium organizes and sheds during menstruation. 🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

Induction of menstruation in mice reveals the regulation of menstrual shedding

During menstruation, an inner layer of the endometrium is selectively shed, while an outer, progenitor-containing layer is preserved to support repeated regeneration. Progress in understanding this co...

biorxiv.org

Very sad news, John Gurdon has died. A developmental biologist's developmental biologist, Nobel prize winner His work is the foundation of much of today's dev & stem cell bio. An inspiration to many, including me. Always asking questions & wanting the answers www.magd.cam.ac.uk/news/profess...

New preprint from the lab! We discovered a transient fluidization in the basal region of human forebrains by tracking microdroplets in cerebral organoids.This “basal fluidization”, absent in gorilla and mouse, may contribute to greater surface expansion in human forebrains 1/ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🧠 Join us @uzh-ch.bsky.social ! We are a new lab looking for PhDs, Postdocs & Master’s students interested in studying how human neural systems emerge & go awry using brain organoids, light-sheet imaging & genomics. 🚀 Deadline for LSZGS 1st Nov! www.lifescience-graduateschool.uzh.ch/en.html.

If you’re applying to your dream lab for an internship/PhD/postdoc, always send a second email 1-2 weeks after the first one if you don’t hear back. I promise we will be grateful rather than annoyed. My email inbox is a disaster and I’m quite junior - and very few of us have secretarial support

Latest from ours: www.cell.com/cell-reports... This is two stories in one: a case study/cautionary tale on developing genetic tools in new organisms, and the first hint at a gene regulatory network for choanoflagellate multicellular development (which turn out to involve a Hippo/YAP/ECM loop!) A 🧵

See this? This = implanting mouse embryo. Usually this happens inside its mother and is invisible to us, but we can actually watch implantation ex vivo with the hope of understanding why implantation goes awry in embryos of older women. A 🧵...

Our latest preprint! Into morphogenesis, Yap, ECM, signaling, vertex models, feedbacks/robustness? There is something here for everyone. We discovered a positive feedback loop that extends inner ear canals, and a built-in mechanism that shuts it down when morphogenesis is done. tinyurl.com/464wsjhd

Tissue 'tectonic' collision is detrimental, but flies found two distinct solutions! Gratifying and grateful to be included in this collective effort, w/ Steffen Lemke, to crack the (or 'a') code of #cephalicfurrow, now out in @nature.com, all with @paveltomancak.bsky.social at the helm. (1/9)

Jim Hudspeth has died 💔 I am so sad. He was probably my favorite hearing researcher of all time. Absolute genius and also generous - he spent hours on the phone advising me on my career even tho we barely knew each other. May his memory be a blessing. www.ted.com/talks/jim_hu...

Jim Hudspeth: The beautiful, mysterious science of how you hear

Have you ever wondered how your ears work? In this delightful and fascinating talk, biophysicist Jim Hudspeth demonstrates the wonderfully simple yet astonishingly powerful mechanics of hair cells, th...

ted.com

So happy for Kira! She also received NOA for her F32.

Crystal Rogers, PhD@rogerslabucd.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Congratulations to the @socdevbio.bsky.social 2025 West Coast Regional Meeting postdoc poster winners (left to right): 1st place- Celja Uebel (Villeneuve lab), 2nd place- Kira Heikes (Munjal lab), honorable mention- Hailey Edward's (Yelon lab)!

This summer's hot ticket: Arolla 2025 meeting "BioMatter - From cytoskeleton to embryo", taking place from 25.08. - 29.08.2025 at Grand Hotel & Kurhaus, Arolla. ‼️ Submit your abstract until the 1st of June and join in: meetings.ls2.ch/arolla2025 ❗ Special rates for LS2 members! ❗