RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) often bind numerous transcripts - but do they act through a network effect? Our new paper in @plosbiology.org shows that the highly conserved LIN28 RBP controls developmental timing in C. elegans larvae through only two targets. doi.org/10.1371/jour... 1/n

I will be opening my research group at the Max Delbrück Center later this year to unravel the principles governing the unique context sensing capacity of the liver www.mdc-berlin.de/schwayer and am looking for enthusiastic PhD applicants.

Schwayer Lab

The mammalian liver possesses a regenerative capacity that is unmatched by any other organ. Following injury, liver epithelial cells can proliferate or even change their identity, enabling the organ t...

mdc-berlin.de

Looking for a PhD? Applications are now open for PhD positions at the Max Delbrück Center. 🧵 www.mdc-berlin.de/career/jobs/...

It was fun writing a perspective about recent work from Fridtjof Brauns, Nikolas Claussen & Boris Shraiman on how tissues can flow without fluidizing: Dynamic control of interfacial tension drives convergent extension, combining instruction & self-organization www.condmatjclub.org/jccm_july_20...

This epic paper, which has been a heroic 10 year journey for the lead author, Ricardo Barrientos, is finally out in Cell today! Many thanks to all co-authors, especially Billie Meadowcroft and Andela Saric for their beautiful MD simulations www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Basement membrane turnover controls cell shape

Basement membranes are scaffolds of proteins, like collagen, that give organs shape. During development, basement membranes must adapt to the growing organ. We infer how fast the basement membrane ada...

cell.com

📢Paper alert📢 Now out in @natcomms.nature.com: malaria parasites in infected red blood cells 🦟🔴 divide asynchronously due to a limiting replication resource🧬. Another great collaboration within #SFB1129 👍 Read our open access paper here: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Competitive resource allocation drives asynchronous and rapid nuclear multiplication in the malaria parasite - Nature Communications

Within red blood cells, Plasmodium falciparum forms cells with multiple nuclei that replicate asynchronously despite residing in a shared cytoplasm. In this study, the authors developed a biophysical ...

doi.org

Thank you @natgenet.nature.com for this nice Research Briefing www.nature.com/articles/s41... on our recent paper reporting live-cell measurements of Sox2 promoter bursting kinetics when varying its genomic distance from the SCR enhancer 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The genomic position of an enhancer modulates bursting dynamics of the cognate promoter - Nature Genetics

We show that, in a genomic locus with minimal complexity, the distance between promoter and enhancer modulates the frequency of clustered transcriptional bursts. Thus, besides the nucleotide sequence,...

nature.com

How can morphogenesis produce complex outcomes, reproducibly? 🤔 We show: remodeling & growth allow buffering against noise & prevent elastic coarsening Led by Nico Romeo, in collab w/ @npmitchell.bsky.social 👉 arxiv.org/abs/2607.23907

I’m starting at the Hubrecht Institute at a new group leader from September. I will be hiring a PhD student through the PhD program ⬇️ If you, or anyone you know, is interested in theoretical biophysics, I will be very excited to hear from them — please send inquiries to my ISTA email for now :)

Hubrecht Institute@hubrechtinstitute.bsky.social · 2w ago

Are you excited to redefine our understanding of molecules, cells, tissues and organisms? Then we are looking for you! Applications for the Hubrecht International PhD program (HIPP) are now open and will be accepted until September 15th. Read more here 👉 www.hubrecht.eu/hipp/

It's not often single author primary research papers are published in our field & it's even rarer when the author is a Nobel Prize winner Check out the new work by Eric Wieschaus in @dev-journal.bsky.social Flattening maternal gradients in Drosophila embryo journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Maternal patterning in early Drosophila embryos: how much information can single maternal gradients supply?

Highlighted Article: Comparison of the patterning capacity of Drosophila embryos that have only one of the three maternal gradients known to control anterior posterior patterning.

journals.biologists.com

New paper in @natphys.nature.com! We uncovered a stress adapation mechanism where keratin intermediate filaments in stretched epithelia undergo a supracellular bundling transition that uncages the nucleus. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @ibecbarcelona.eu, @upc.edu @qmul.bsky.social

Very happy that our workshop on developmental robustness is happening! Thank you to @biologists.bsky.social for making it possible and to all the speakers for accepting the invitation. Join us! Applications for funded positions are now open.

The Company of Biologists@biologists.bsky.social · 2w ago

Funded places are available for early-career researchers at our Workshop on Bridging Scales and Disciplines to Understand Robust Development, 18-21 April 2027, organised by Mauricio Rocha Martins and Giulia Paci @giuliapaci.bsky.social Find out more and apply at www.biologists.com/workshops/ap...

How do tissues safely remove cells? Join me, @marija-matejcic.bsky.social in this perspective on the past, present and future of epithelial cell extrusion 🧵 0/16

Our paper about predicting cell fates from combinatorial signals in 2D human gastruloids received a preprint highlight in @dev-journal.bsky.social Thank you @ancheldjs.bsky.social for a great perspective piece on our work! 👉 journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

David Brückner@davidbrueckner.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Can a snapshot of cell signaling predict cell fate? 🤔 Combining iterative immunofluorescence, information theory & machine learning we show that combinatorial signaling encodes fate at single-cell level in 2D human gastruloids This reveals an interpretable & generalizable signal-to-fate map 🗺️

Excited to be part of the first cohort of Preprint Editors at @dev-journal.bsky.social @biologists.bsky.social I will discuss selected preprints in stem cell biology, embryogenesis, signaling & genome integrity. Contact me if you come across an interesting preprint that you wish to highlight!

Our paper on nonlocal decoding is now out in @physrevlett.aps.org! See below for a thread about the preprint 🧵 👉 journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

David Brückner@davidbrueckner.bsky.social · 7mo ago

How can cells use information from neighboring cells to improve the spatial precision of morphogen patterns? 🤔 We show that cells can gain positional information by "talking" to their neighbors - how much depends critically on spatial correlations of the patterns. buff.ly/w56OUJT

Our preprint is now out in @natgenet.nature.com ! doi.org/10.1038/s415... We measured Sox2 promoter bursting dynamics with the SCR enhancer positioned at different distances within a genomic locus devoid of confounding effects in mESC: Main findings in the 🧵 below:

Enhancer control of promoter activity and variability via frequency modulation of clustered transcriptional bursts - Nature Genetics

Tünnermann et al. use live-cell imaging to study promoter activity under the control of an enhancer inserted at different genomic distances. RNA production from the promoter occurs in clusters of tran...

doi.org

Luca Giorgetti lab @FMI@lucagiorgetti.bsky.social · last yr.

Celebrating 10 years of our lab with a new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How does enhancer location within a TAD control transcriptional bursts from a cognate promoter? Experiments by Jana Tünnermann and modelling by Gregory Roth

The videos of the talks from speakers at the conference @college-de-france.fr on Information processing and biological computation on June 26 are available at the link below. Or on YouTube directly. Enjoy!

Collège de France@college-de-france.fr · 4w ago

#Science #Biologie 🔬 « Information Flow and Computation in Living Systems » 🖥️ Les vidéos du colloque organisé par le Pr @thomaslecuit.bsky.social, titulaire de chaire Dynamiques du vivant, sont disponibles.  👉 https://tinyurl.com/v7mb5kjp

🪲🪰 Our preprint is out! This was a team effort with @wolframponisch.bsky.social, @matthewabenton.bsky.social and Ewa Paluch. We asked whether Drosophila and Tribolium use the same cell behaviours to fold their embryos during gastrulation. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Morphospace analysis reveals divergent cellular behaviours driving tissue internalisation during insect gastrulation

During gastrulation, embryonic epithelia undergo large-scale remodelling to internalise the mesoderm. Whether the cellular mechanisms underlying these tissue deformations are conserved across species ...

biorxiv.org

Thrilled to share our new paper on cell extrusion. A beautiful study with a tremendous amount of data, led by the fantastic @fanny-wodrascka.bsky.social ! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Come join us at the @biozentrum.unibas.ch as Professor in Climate Biophysics. Blue-sky research, inspiring colleagues, and generous support.

Ben Engel@cellarchlab.com · last mo.

Super excited to launch this search for a new endowed professor at the @biozentrum.unibas.ch! Join us to build a research cluster in Climate Biophysics! 🌍🌊🌾🔬🧪 This is a unique opportunity to create a community in Basel🇨🇭working together on this timely topic! ⏳🌡️ Questions? Please reach out! 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

Super excited to launch this search for a new endowed professor at the @biozentrum.unibas.ch! Join us to build a research cluster in Climate Biophysics! 🌍🌊🌾🔬🧪 This is a unique opportunity to create a community in Basel🇨🇭working together on this timely topic! ⏳🌡️ Questions? Please reach out! 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

Biozentrum, University of Basel@biozentrum.unibas.ch · last mo.

New Assistant (tenure-track) or Associate Professor position in Climate #Biophysics! Join our international research community to explore fundamental molecular mechanisms underlying climate-relevant biological processes. Apply by 7 Sept 2026! www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/de/open-posi...

New in @dev-journal.bsky.social: how tissue shape tells cells what to become Using human stem-cell neuruloids, we show how that physical boundaries encode positional information that drives cell fate patterning in a model of trunk formation A thread 🧵 journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Boundary constraints can determine pattern emergence

Summary: A reaction-diffusion mechanism recapitulates pattern emergence in an in vitro model of neuromesodermal progenitors under a variety of boundary and geometrical perturbations.

journals.biologists.com

What do single bacterial cells do when they run out of carbon source? If you missed the preprint, check out the official publication: doi.org/10.1038/s443... If the total bacterial population on earth stays roughly constant, then there must on average be as much death as replication. 1/n

E. coli prepares for starvation by dramatically remodeling its proteome in the first hours after loss of nutrients - Molecular Systems Biology

Although in the wild bacteria likely spend most of their time deprived of nutrients and slowly starving to death, very little is known about how bacteria adapt their phenotype to starvation. Here we combine microfluidics with quantitative fluorescence microscopy of transcriptional reporters to comprehensively quantify growth and gene expression at the single-cell level in E. coli during carbon starvation. We find that all cells immediately stop growing upon loss of carbon source and that almost all remain alive for over 30 hours. Furthermore, entry into starvation triggers a dynamic expression program that is remarkably homogeneous across single cells, but highly variable across genes, causing dramatic remodeling of the proteome early in starvation. We further show that, as protein production and the rate of protein degradation both decay approximately exponentially, protein concentrations become essentially ‘frozen’ after the first 5 to 10 hours, setting phenotypes for several days of starvation. Finally, using experiments in which gene expression is inhibited for different periods, we show that protein production in the first 5 hours is crucial for protecting cells from stresses late in starvation.

doi.org

How do cells combine cell-intrinsic & tissue-level cues create stable patterns during intestinal regeneration? 🤔 Our paper w/ @cschwayer.bsky.social @silviabarbiero.bsky.social @ehannezo.bsky.social @priscaliberali.bsky.social is out! 🥳 A thread on the theory part 🧵⬇️ www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Multiscale integration of tissue and chromatin context converts cell heterogeneity into stable intestinal patterning

During regeneration, tissues must translate transient cellular variability into stable spatial organization. Tissue architecture generates a density-dependent window of heterogeneity in the mechanosen...

cell.com

Have ideas for your own, independent research program in Theoretical Biology? Then come and join us as a Group Leader at the @mpi-evolbio.bsky.social in Plön, Germany!

Group Leader in Theoretical Biology (m/f/d)

Experience in Theoretical Biology, Applied Mathematics, Theoretical Physics

mpg.de

It’s out!! 🎉 My first PhD paper has been published in Cell 🤩 A huge thank you to amazing co-authors @cschwayer.bsky.social and @davidbrueckner.bsky.social , and to our fantastic mentors @priscaliberali.bsky.social and @ehannezo.bsky.social for their guidance and support throughout this journey!

Prisca Liberali@priscaliberali.bsky.social · last mo.

It is out 😍 check it out!! Multiscale integration of tissue and chromatin context converts cell heterogeneity into stable intestinal patterning. @cschwayer.bsky.social @silviabarbiero.bsky.social @davidbrueckner.bsky.social @ehannezo.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Excited to share that our work on ‘How the gut gets patterned during regeneration’ is out now cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(26)00696-3 Thanks a lot to @priscaliberali.bsky.social @silviabarbiero.bsky.social @davidbrueckner.bsky.social @ehannezo.bsky.social and all co-authors! 🧵

Multiscale integration of tissue and chromatin context converts cell heterogeneity into stable intestinal patterning

During regeneration, tissues must translate transient cellular variability into stable spatial organization. Tissue architecture generates a density-dependent window of heterogeneity in the mechanosen...

cell.com

It is out 😍 check it out!! Multiscale integration of tissue and chromatin context converts cell heterogeneity into stable intestinal patterning. @cschwayer.bsky.social @silviabarbiero.bsky.social @davidbrueckner.bsky.social @ehannezo.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Multiscale integration of tissue and chromatin context converts cell heterogeneity into stable intestinal patterning

During regeneration, tissues must translate transient cellular variability into stable spatial organization. Tissue architecture generates a density-dependent window of heterogeneity in the mechanosen...

cell.com

What if an embryo made immune cells before it finished building the tissue they usually come from? In our new preprint, we show that annual killifish embryos specify neutrophils before germ layers are fully resolved. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Huge thanks to my PI, @ohnolog.bsky.social ! 🧵

Early immune cell development precedes gastrulation in annual killifish

During embryogenesis, cell types arise in a predictable order because developmental regulators act sequentially. But how evolutionary changes in morphogenesis reshape the signaling environments that a...

biorxiv.org