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 · 11mo ago

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 · 5mo 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

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)

Boris Shraiman points a physicist’s eye on biological quandaries news.ucsb.edu/2025/022264/... 🧪

Boris Shraiman points a physicist’s eye on biological quandaries

Boris Shraiman is awarded the American Physical Society’s Max Delbrück Prize in Biological Physics.

news.ucsb.edu

SCHEPHERD--the bioelectric cell herding platform built for YOU. Single cells, monolayers, organoids--this herds them all + new tricks. Plz try it-- we will *give* you parts! Teaser here of a steering a single cell. GS Yubin Lin's lifeblood with J. Yodh on piano; Celeste R. and Paul K. Thread 1/N

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 11mo ago

SCHEPHERD: A universal platform for high-throughput, high-resolution, and programmable control of cell behavior through bioelectric stimulation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.16.674226v1

📣 New preprint: Mechanochemical feedback, tissue geometry & rigid-body dynamics initiate rotational migration in Drosophila via spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. A mechanism generalizable to closed epithelia. @sreejithsanthosh.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Peer pressure shapes the gut: latest publication in @pnas.org by @lepuslapis.bsky.social, @zhaoshh.bsky.social from @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social with colleagues from @flatironinstitute.org and Princeton University. www.mpi-cbg.de/news-outreac...

Peer pressure shapes the gut

International research team develops mechanical model to explain the shaping of the fruit fly hindgut by forces from neighbouring tissues

mpi-cbg.de

🧵1/14 Preprint thread! Can we predict a cell’s fate based on its dynamics? 🔮 Our new study unveils a framework for watching development unfold in real-time, revealing how a cell's shape and movement encode info about its future fate. 🔬📄 Preprint: tinyurl.com/4shf8v4x

This piece of work from my PhD is FRESHLY out of the oven in @natureportfolio.nature.com Nature Physics! It illustrates how architecture and active stress mutually regulate Criticality and exhibit Anderson Localization-like phenomenon. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Feedback between F-actin organization and active stress governs criticality and energy localization in the cell cytoskeleton - Nature Physics

Self-organized criticality can occur in cellular systems, but its origins remain unclear. Now it is shown that cytoskeletal criticality is influenced by the F-actin architecture and myosin active stre...

nature.com

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪 www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...

How a discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR - Richmond Scientific

A discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR, the gold-standard COVID-19 tests used to fight the global pandemic.

richmondscientific.com