Super happy to see our work investigating best4+ cell development and function now out in Genes & Development, with some exciting new data! genesdev.cshlp.org/content/earl...

Congrats to @jeffreyafarrell.bsky.social and team for an excellent paper looking at BEST4 cell development and function in zebrafish.

A conserved Notch-Meis1-Pbx cascade specifies secretory progenitors into spatially diverse intestinal best4 + cells - PubMed

<span><i>best4</i> ⁺ cells are a recently described vertebrate intestinal epithelial cell type. <i>best4</i> ^<i>+</i> cells are altered in inflammatory bowel disease and colorect...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

So honored to receive the @socdevbio.bsky.social SciCom award and to share my work with the wonderful people in this community! This #2026SDB conference was a celebration of biodiversity 🧵

Congratulations, @jeffreyafarrell.bsky.social, on winning the @socdevbio.bsky.social #2026SDB Elizabeth D. Hay New Investigator Award! Learn more about Jeff's science and career in his @dev-journal.bsky.social interview with @saanjbati.bsky.social.

Transitions in development – an interview with Jeffrey Farrell

Jeffrey Farrell is an Earl Stadtman Investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), USA, where he heads the Unit on Cell Specification and ...

doi.org

Come join us! 🔬🐣 The Piacentino Lab at Johns Hopkins @hopkinsmedicine.bsky.social is recruiting a postdoc to study membrane lipids, cell migration, and invasion in neural crest and embryonic models! @socdevbio.bsky.social @ascbiology.bsky.social #devbiol #cellbio #lipids

This morning!! Tune in!

International Zebrafish Society@izfs.bsky.social · last mo.

FOUR DAYS AWAY: #IZFS Webinar on July 16 at 10 am EDT! Join in for How Specialized Cell Types Arise in Evolution and Development: Insights from Brain and Gut with Megan Y Dennis and Jeffrey Farrell. Red more and register here: www.izfs.org/education/we... #IZFSWebinar #brainandgut

✨Jeffrey Farrell @jeffreyafarrell.bsky.social is a Stadtman Investigator at the NIH. He has led seminal work constructing single-cell RNAseq atlases for entire embryos using zebrafish. We are excited to host Jeffrey at the #2026SDB in Las Vegas! 🔬

Hard to say goodbye today to the lab’s first postdoc, but so excited to see what @abhinavsur.bsky.social will do in his new lab at U Arizona. We’re going to miss you deeply over here. Safe travels and knock em dead.

Apply to this course!!! The deadline is soon, but if you are considering using zebrafish for the first time in your career, this is an incredible opportunity. I took this in 2013, and it changed my career - and started several friendships and scientific relationships that persist to today!

Pauli Group (posts by Andi Pauli)@pauligroup.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Interested in expanding your zebrafish skills or completely new to zebrafish as model system for your research question? Then this course is for YOU! Deadline for applying is on March 2nd, so get your applications in. PS: It's a fantastic course - changed my own career! www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

It’s a real honour to receive the Viktor Hamburger Outstanding Educator Prize from the SDB. Teaching is one of the most rewarding parts of my life. Thanks to the SDB and the hundreds of students and faculty at the Quintay course who have made it such a joy.

Society for Developmental Biology@socdevbio.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Congrats to the 2026 SDB Award Winners! Conklin Medal: Lee Niswander SDB Lifetime Achievement Award: Alexandra Joyner Hamburger Outstanding Educator Prize: Roberto Mayor Hay New Investigator Award: Jeffrey Farrell SDB Trainee SciComm Award: Nicholas Desnoyer bit.ly/4afnjiC

Oh man! What a crazy honor to receive this award from SDB!! I love being a part of SDB so much - it has led to so many awesome ideas, collaborations, and friendships over the last 13 years, so this is really exciting. Looking forward to seeing you all at the meeting. Thank you, SDB!!!

Society for Developmental Biology@socdevbio.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Congrats to the 2026 SDB Award Winners! Conklin Medal: Lee Niswander SDB Lifetime Achievement Award: Alexandra Joyner Hamburger Outstanding Educator Prize: Roberto Mayor Hay New Investigator Award: Jeffrey Farrell SDB Trainee SciComm Award: Nicholas Desnoyer bit.ly/4afnjiC

I’m recruiting new members to the Farrell Lab this summer. We will have space for 1 postdoc (since Abhinav is leaving to start his own lab at U Arizona!!) and 2 postbacs, since my current two will leave for PhD programs at the end of the summer. More details in thread:

Happy New Year! NEW LAB PREPRINT testing how best4+ intestinal epithelial cells develop! best4+ cells are conserved across vertebrates and altered in IBD & colorectal cancer. But they were first molecularly IDed in 2019. We barely know anything about them yet! What do they do?? HOW DO THEY GET MADE?

Abhinav Sur@abhinavsur.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Closing out 2025 with our new preprint where @jeffreyafarrell.bsky.social and I explore development and function of zebrafish intestinal best4+ cells – molecularly described in 2019, conserved in evolution, absent in 🐭, and altered in inflammatory bowel disease. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#zebrafish genome update, our T2T assembly of the inbred strain of AB (M-AB) generated by my buddy Nori Sakai has now been released at NCBI and will be a second reference genome for zebrafish (GRCz12ab):

Ok, friends! If you’re a Daniocell user, it’s now available again outside of the NIH. Very sorry for any inconvenience this posed for any of you and thanks for your patience. We’re taking additional steps to hopefully prevent similar outages in the future. Happy surfing 🎣

Hey friends - Daniocell is experiencing a temporary outage right now. The NICHD server it is hosted on got dropped from the NIH’s firewall list & so currently can’t be accessed outside the NIH. The relevant IT teams are working to resolve it. Sorry for any inconvenience. It’ll be back soon!!

It was super fun working on this interview with Saanjbati Adhikari about my path during my scientific training.

Development@dev-journal.bsky.social · last yr.

Transitions in development – an interview with Jeffrey Farrell @jeffreyafarrell.bsky.social talks about becoming a group leader, his insights on advocacy for developmental biology and his belief in unifying single-cell biology with classical approaches. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

@mads100tist.bsky.social calling attention to the awesomeness of #zebrafish #devbio and community. #SDB

If you love Daniocell, but wish it could generate analyses specific to YOUR genes & cell types of interest, check out DaniocellDesktop - a new point-and-click app for Mac and Windows that enables reanalysis of the Daniocell data without programming: daniocell.nichd.nih.gov/desktop/ (1/4)

To dissect the gene regulatory networks used to build organisms, we need Perturb-seq-like tools that work in whole animals. For this purpose, we developed MIC-Drop-seq, a tool that couples high-throughput CRISPR in zebrafish embryos with single-cell RNAseq. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

MIC-Drop-seq: Scalable single-cell phenotyping of mutant vertebrate embryos

Pooled perturbation screens can reveal cellular regulatory networks, yet scaling these techniques for large-scale screens in animals remains challenging. To address this, we developed MIC-Drop-seq, wh...

biorxiv.org

It was so awesome to have @jeffreyafarrell.bsky.social here to give a departmental seminar today!!

I am looking for postdocs to join my group at NIH. Are you interested in Development, Evolution, Genetics, Genomics, and Human health? Please apply! www.training.nih.gov/jobs/pdf-mb-...

An example of what we in the NIH Intramural program can accomplish. Excited to share our latest paper in close collaboration with Nick Ryba's group. We examined how inflammation transforms representation in somatosensory neurons to cause pain. Lots of surprises here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“These findings support the use of zebrafish as a useful comparative model for studying the meninges, provide a foundational description for future zebrafish meningeal research” New work from @biomarina-vg.bsky.social & Weinstein Lab at NIH 🐟

bioRxiv Developmental Biology@biorxiv-devbio.bsky.social · last yr.

Anatomical and Molecular Characterization of the Zebrafish Meninges https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.09.646894v1

Happy to share a new preprint from my lab! We characterize the on/off kinetics, light dosage-dependence, and more for a suite of optogenetic signaling activators in zebrafish embryos 💡 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An optogenetic toolkit for robust activation of FGF, BMP, and Nodal signaling in zebrafish

Cell signaling regulates a wide range of biological processes including development, homeostasis, and disease. Accessible technologies to precisely manipulate signaling have important applications in ...

biorxiv.org

If you want to make it easy for editors to find reviewers for your manuscript, pre-print it so that prospective reviewers can quickly scan through it to make sure it's within their expertise and not going to be a slog. I am 5x more likely to accept if I can spend 5 minutes looking at the figs.

The life of each of us began when a sperm and an egg came together. But what happens at a molecular level? Our latest work in Cell led by @vdeneke.bsky.social & Andreas Blaha reveals a conserved fertilization complex that bridges sperm and egg in vertebrates! (1/11) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Out now in Dev Cell! scRNAseq trajectories describe the cascade of gene expression as cells differentiate, but turning them into a clear understanding of the underlying biology of a cell type's development remains challenging. authors.elsevier.com/c/1k9qj5Sx5g... (1/)

So happy that we got to work with Jamie a little bit on this project. Congrats to Andy Sposato on her awesome work!!!!

James Gagnon@james-gagnon.bsky.social · 2y ago

How does the testis age? Our first paper on this topic is now out in Development. Spermatogonia become less able to contribute to sperm production in older males, and in some cases we see really wild gene expression, like pluripotency genes and even ovary genes! doi.org/10.1242/dev....

NICHD Intramural (Bethesda, MD) is having a faculty search this year, focused on neural development. Apply by Sep 30 via two routes (Stadtman + direct, see thread). Details: (1/5)