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...

Very excited to announce that my paper with @toettch.bsky.social from my time as a Fellow at Princeton's Center for the Physics of Biological Function @cpbf.bsky.social is finally out as a preprint! Here is the link if you want to check it out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A thread: (1/10)

A modular live-cell biosensor for extracellular protease activity

Extracellular protease activity plays key roles in cell and tissue behavior, processing cell surface proteins, ligands and the extracellular matrix. Extracellular proteases can be subject to complex p...

biorxiv.org

@drsusanna.bsky.social paper is now out in its final form. Relative to the original preprint, we now show additional mutant data and a better way to display heat maps of gene activation. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Rapid transcriptional response to a dynamic morphogen by time integration

Using quantitative live imaging, Brantley et al. reveal that cells decode dynamic BMP signaling during dorsal patterning of the Drosophila embryo by integrating activity over time. These results advan...

cell.com

1/13 So excited to share our new preprint!! How do organelles pack together in a crowded cytoplasm? we know organelles interact via contact sites, but how does competition for space contribute to organelle morphology and interactions? @wallaceucsf.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint from my lab! Will Anderson developed a transgenic #zebrafish ubiquitously expressing an optogenetic FGF/ERK activator. We're having a lot of fun with it and think you will too! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New review on optogenetics in development is out in @genesdev.bsky.social with @toettch.bsky.social and Yang Gao! 💙💡🔦 genesdev.cshlp.org/content/earl... We aim to capture why opto is such a powerful tool for devbio and how future advances can make it even better. Some highlights:

Thrilled to share our work using live imaging to understand how Epiblast (future embryo proper) and Primitive Endoderm (future extraembryonic tissues) cell fates segregate in the preimplantation mouse embryo. Gargantuan effort led by amazing @rpkimyip.bsky.social, David Denberg and Denis Faerberg!

pYtags - our in vivo biosensors for receptor tyrosine kinases - in all their beauty on the cover of Cell Reports! Read more here: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Excited to share that our work building in vivo biosensors for receptor tyrosine kinases (pYtags!) is now out www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Excited to share the bulk of my postdocotoral work from the @ditalialab.bsky.social on how cells interpret dynamic morphogen signaling during development! Many thanks to our collaborators & coauthors @shelbyflies.bsky.social, Massimo Vergassola, Jacqueline Janssen, and Anna Chao.

Website and registration will open soon for the West Coast SDB meeting, Aug 14–17 at Cal-Poly SLO! Abstract deadline for talks is July 7. Final deadline for abstracts (posters) and registration is July 31. We will have prizes for best undergrad, grad, and post doc presentations! #wcsdb2025 1/4

I'd like to share a little bit of happy lab news in these chaotic times: a new preprint, driven by the brilliant Qinhao Cao! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We address a big challenge in synbio: If you give me a protein "X", how can I give you a version of X whose activity is controlled by a kinase?

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

New(ish) preprint! 📰What whole-cell patterns emerge from the arrangement, morphologies, and interactions of organelles in the 3D space of the cell? What would we see if we could gather ALL the whole-cell reconstruction data that's out there in one place? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/11

A scoping study of the whole-cell imaging literature: a foundational corpus, potential for mesoscale data synthesis, and implications for standardization of an emerging field

The level of cellular organization bridging the mesoscale and whole-cell scale is coming into focus as a new frontier in cell biology. Great progress has been made in unraveling the complex physical a...

biorxiv.org

I'm so happy to report that our preprint on light-induced collective cell migration has now been published in Cell Systems! This project was a lot of fun and will be the basis for a lot of our ongoing & future work.

Large-scale control over collective cell migration using light-activated epidermal growth factor receptors

Programmable control over tissue movement is a fundamental challenge for tissue engineering and wound healing. Suh, Thornton, et al. discovered that a light-controlled EGF receptor controls long-range...

cell.com

How many cells do you need to establish PCP? The magic number is 3! Beautiful work by Lena Basta in Danelle Devenport's lab. Happy to have contributed. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Epithelial polarization by the planar cell polarity complex is exclusively non–cell autonomous

For cells to polarize collectively along a tissue plane, asymmetrically localized planar cell polarity (PCP) complexes must form intercellular contacts between neighboring cells. Yet, it is unknown wh...

science.org

Developmental systems have regions that deform actively or passively from their active neighbors. We use a ring of tissue as a model to investigate this boundary-driven morphogenesis in its biological context, learning something about gastrulation and possibly blastopore geometries in the process!

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

New #preprint: "A model for boundary-driven tissue morphogenesis" arxiv.org/abs/2503.03688. A great collaboration with @danielalber.bsky.social @zhaoshh.bsky.social, Alexandre Jacinto, Eric Wieschaus, Stas Shvartsman. @flatironinstitute.org @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social

A duo of preprints on the dynamics of the first cell fate decision in mouse by Madeleine Chalifoux (first grad student in the lab!) and Maria Avdeeva (Flatiron). We use quantitative live imaging of key cell fate determinants to follow the segregation of inner cell mass and trophectoderm lineages.

The Society for Developmental Biology has released a statement on the Unprecedented Disruptions to Biomedical Research in the United States.

Have you ever wanted to *see* receptor activity in embryos? If so, our new preprint is for you! In it, we showcase a new live-cell biosensor for visualizing receptor tyrosine kinase activity in living embryos – pYtags! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint from Alex Long, Tim Stearns, Jessica Feldman, Lillian Fritz-Laylin and colleagues! Chytrids are neat, understudied and ecologically important as frog pathogens. Shown here, they also remodel their centrioles during cilia disassembly prior to mitosis: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Dynamic remodeling of centrioles and the microtubule cytoskeleton in the lifecycle of chytrid fungi

Cells reorganize in space and time to move and divide - complex behaviors driven by their internal cytoskeleton. While we have substantial knowledge of the molecular parts and rules of cytoskeletal as...

biorxiv.org

Wishing you all the best for 2025 ! ...and a little late thread on our recent preprint studying how tissue growth is affected by mild induction of apoptosis. Drosophila wing disc readjusts global tissue size by modulating dev. time without local proliferation boost. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Developmental delay ensures global tissue size robustness upon local induction of apoptosis

The capacity of our tissues to cope with external and internal stress relies on the tight coupling between cell proliferation, cell growth and cell death. This coupling is assumed to be based on compe...

biorxiv.org

Can’t wait for all the amazing things to come from the Ramm lab!

Beatrice Ramm@beatriceramm.bsky.social · 2y ago

Thrilled to announce that in January I will be opening my own lab at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social of the Max Planck Society @maxplanck.de in lovely Tübingen, Germany!

Thrilled to announce that in January I will be opening my own lab at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social of the Max Planck Society @maxplanck.de in lovely Tübingen, Germany!