What determines how epithelial cells divide when shape cues disappear? Our new work in @natcomms.nature.com shows that divisions follow maximal stress anisotropy — a “principal-stress rule” beyond Hertwig’s long-axis rule. Fantastic work led by @luanger.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The puzzle of living 'cowlicks' and cellular swirls at phys.org phys.org/news/2026-09...

From swarming bacteria to tissue cells, living matter defies classic physical models of motion

A new study led by researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) reveals that living matter violates previously known physical principles of symmetry when cellular flows form and break dow...

phys.org

NeMo is finally out! 🐟 We present our new method to peel cellular layers and extract their nematics. If you're wondering what a fish has to do with curved nematics, check out the thread and the publication 👀👇🏼 arxiv.org/html/2609.12...

“If AI is going to transform science, science cannot afford to lower its standards just to make AI look transformative.”

Colin Carlson@colincarlson.bsky.social · last mo.

manlius.substack.com/p/no-ai-hasn...

☕Embryos from aged mice have increased contractility & tissue viscosity on E4.5, causing poor spreading and attachment. Similar age-associated mechanical changes in human embryos correlate with implantation potential. @katecavanaugh.bsky.social 👉https://rdcu.be/fCDVb www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Elevated contractility drives implantation failure in mouse embryos from aged females - Nature Cell Biology

Cavanaugh et al. show that embryos from aged mice have increased contractility and tissue viscosity on embryonic day 4.5, which leads to poor spreading and attachment. Similar age-associated mechanica...

nature.com

A perspective in @natmethods.nature.com on Why forces are fundamental to understanding how life comes into being - by us, @campaslab.bsky.social @yanlanmao.bsky.social @sarawickstrom.bsky.social Miguel Concha, Alba Diz-Muñoz and @streichan.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The physics of sculpting a living creature - Nature Methods

Cell biologists have long known that mechanical forces, such as tension and compression, influence tissue differentiation. Now, advanced methods are letting them observe and manipulate these forces in...

nature.com

As a modeller, it’s sometimes hard to convey the idea that adding complexity to our models (ostensibly making them more realistic) doesn’t necessarily give us more explanatory power. This paper makes that point clear by arguing why simpler models are often more illuminating. Congrats to the authors!

Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda@alejandrofabregastejeda.com · 2mo ago

As simulations grow in complexity, a set of non-trivial issues emerge: diminished identifiability as free parameters become too numerous relative to exp. constraints & difficulties grasping causality. In our new 📄, we point to potential avenues to move #CellBio forward 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2608.06998

Check out our new preprint, where we rethink cell-monolayer mechanics through the lens of odd mechanics and show how non-equilibrium mechanical couplings can help explain their collective behavior.

Mattia Serra@mattiaserra.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Preprint📣: Living tissues can exhibit odd mechanics without chirality. Our minimal model shows that orientational order can generate an odd modulus—inferable from experiments—and reproduces flows & stress localization around 1/2 defects. @sreejithsanthosh.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New Toettchlab paper alert! Harrison Oatman just published his beautiful work combining software design for "smart" microscopy+optogenetics and some really beautiful work understanding EGFR-driven collective cell migration. www.cell.com/cell-systems...

🎨🔬 Can techniques from the arts become tools for scientific discovery? Our new preprint introduces glass-based physical models for studying tissue mechanics, bridging art, physics, engineering, and biology! 😀 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2606.22281

1/ Out today in Science (@science.org): a result a decade in the making, and one that changed how I think about what cells are doing when they grow. We found a bacterium that grows slower than it could. And we found the molecular switch that lets us reverse it.

New preprint from my Ph.D.: 'Mechanical organization yields degenerate dissipation beyond linear response' We asked how energy dissipation changes as an active actomyosin material is driven farther from equilibrium. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Nematic order in cellular tissues: a standardized framework and anomalous defect dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.22.719598v1

📢Preprint: Positional information (PI) and information flows in dynamic tissues. Our mathematical framework quantifies, from data, how the coupled stochastic dynamics of cell positions and properties preserve, degrade and generate PI. @alex-plum.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How can we learn tissue mechanics directly from cell patterns and images? In our new preprint, we introduce VertAX, a differentiable vertex-model framework in JAX for simulating epithelia, inferring parameters, and designing target tissue behaviors. shorturl.at/PUzT0 1/5

We have postdoc openings for data-driven modeling and information flows in living systems, with a focus on embryonic development. mattiaserra.com Requirements: PhD in Physics, Applied Math, or similar; prior exposure to biological data preferred. Please share with potential candidates. Thank you!

Now #published @physreve.bsky.social: "Elasticity and plasticity of epithelial gap closure" doi.org/10.1103/qtcv-gk3y #PhD work of Maryam Setoudeh, a model of cell intercalations during epiboly as elastoplastic deformations of a surface. @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social

Pierre Haas@lepuslapis.bsky.social · last yr.

Another #preprint: "Elasticity and plasticity of epithelial gap closure", from the #PhD work of Maryam Setoudeh: arxiv.org/abs/2509.05110 This one required a lot of (I think) beautiful #mechanics! @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social

New #preprint: "A mechanical bifurcation constrains the evolution of cell sheet folding in the family Volvocaceae" arxiv.org/abs/2603.15171 The next chapter in the #Volvox saga: work done by Valens Tribet during his internship in my group. @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social

Are robotic swarms the next state of matter? Excited to share the very first preprint from the lab! "Three phases of odd robotic matter" arxiv.org/abs/2603.09897

How can we hope to understand organismal development when it is controlled by huge, complex networks of interacting genes? 
One option is to move away from molecular details and focus on learning representations and rules. Check out the new perspective from me and @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social

James Briscoe@jamesbriscoe.bsky.social · 7mo ago

New Perspective form Rory Maizels & me: "Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations" Gene regulatory networks are supposed to give us mechanistic explanations of development, so why are we drowning in 'hairballs' of statistical correlations? rdcu.be/e7zx7

An active material that's trying to contract can be guided by changing its friction with the environment. We predict some interesting examples, including patterns that can drive circular or linear motion of clumps of material. Work with Miller Fellow Cody Schimming: arxiv.org/abs/2603.03232

Sometimes, the only way to build back up is to let everything fall apart. This is certainly true at the cellular level. www.quantamagazine.org/break-it-to-...

Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues and Organs | Quanta Magazine

Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can later withstand immense forces.

quantamagazine.org

Excited to share our new review in @dev-journal.bsky.social on tissue phase transitions during development! @karengrace12.bsky.social @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social 🔗 doi.org/10.1242/dev....

Tissue phase transitions in development: more than just mechanics

Summary: Tissue material phase transitions are classically thought to regulate tissue deformability. This Review emphasises their unexpected roles in directly influencing growth and patterning signall...

doi.org

From Pankaj’s Mehta group www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... “Our findings highlight the need for rigorous benchmarking and suggest that the biology of cell identity can be captured by simple linear representations of single cell gene expression data.” 🔥🔥🔥

🧪⚛️ Ever wondered what would happen if you thrashed around in a water tank, creating a blob of turbulence, and then watched it spread and gradually dissipate energy? So did we. But we did the experiment, now out in PNAS and on the cover! It only took us 7 years ... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2602.08105 We use mutual information to find the shared dimensionality of shared latent space between two high-dimensional variables. Turning inference into optimization, we use it to figure out dofs in movies and critical scaling in Ising!

Mutual information and task-relevant latent dimensionality

Estimating the dimensionality of the latent representation needed for prediction -- the task-relevant dimension -- is a difficult, largely unsolved problem with broad scientific applications. We cast ...

arxiv.org

What determines the sharpness of cell fate boundaries in gradient-based patterning? We quantified #transition #zone #widths (TZW) across seven progenitor domain boundaries spanning the entire dorsal-ventral axis of the developing #mouse #neural #tube. Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... 🧵 1/6

Feb 1 deadline approaching for our @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social QBio summer course on Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals. @streichan.bsky.social @maurazimmermann.bsky.social @maizel-lab.org @yusuke-mori.bsky.social @akankshi.bsky.social @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social

Happy to share our new work from my graduate lab: DynamicAtlas, a morphodynamic atlas of Drosophila development! We develop methods for morphological time alignment of live data. Surprisingly, we find that the kinematics of fly morphogenesis are *very* simple. Enjoy! 
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

DynamicAtlas: a morphodynamic atlas for Drosophila development - Nature Methods

DynamicAtlas integrates fixed and live imaging data to generate a morphodynamic atlas of Drosophila development.

nature.com

Very happy to share our 'Evoscape' paper, now published in PNAS ! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Generative epigenetic landscapes map the topology and topography of cell fates | PNAS

Epigenetic landscapes were proposed by Waddington as the central concept to describe cell fate dynamics in a locally low-dimensional space. In mode...

pnas.org