I'm happy to share our latest on #coral single-cell biology: a transcriptomic timecourse of heat stress in Stylophora pistillata, from bleaching to recovery 🪸🌊 This project was spearheaded by Shani Levy and carried through in @arnausebe.bsky.social's lab at @crg.eu. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Good to see our results from xenacoelomorphs (doi.org/10.1038/s415...) made it into the new BBC "Evolution" documentary! www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgjZ...

🔬 Meet Mathilde Paris, PI and co-leader of the ZooCELL team at IGFL! In this thread, Mathilde shares what first drew her to EvoDevo, the questions that drive her research, and what she enjoys most about mentoring the next generation of scientists. 🧵👇 #EvoDevo #genomics #regeneration #MSCA #IGFL

🔬 Meet Michalis Averof, ZooCELL PI at IGFL @michalis-averof.bsky.social What sparked his interest in EvoDevo? What keeps him curious after all these years? And what does he hope to discover next? 🧵 Read on to get to know Michalis through his own words. #ZooCELL#EvoDevo#genomics#IGFL#MSCA

Great first day at the European Conference on echinoderms, looking forward to the rest of the presentations over the coming days #ECE12 #echinoderm 🌊⭐️🥒

Do you work with scRNAseq data in non-model organisms that have less-than-stellar gene annotations? ✨ 🧬 You might be interested in GeneExt, a nifty little tool by @zolotarg.bsky.social in @arnausebe.bsky.social's lab, published in #Bioinformatics earlier this year. #singlecell #transcriptomics

GeneExt: a gene model extension tool for enhanced single-cell RNA-seq analysis

AbstractMotivation. Incomplete gene models negatively impact single-cell gene expression quantification. This is particularly true in non-model species whe

academic.oup.com

Fantastic seminar by Chris @lowelab.bsky.social. It’s been a real pleasure having you at @szndohrn.bsky.social these days. With @arnonelab.bsky.social

🔬 Meet Ina Arnone, ZooCELL PI at @szndohrn.bsky.social In this Q&A, she shares how she discovered EvoDevo, the big questions driving their research and her passion for mentoring the next generation of scientists. Follow the thread to learn more. 👇 #MSCA #ZooCELL #EvoDevo @arnonelab.bsky.social

The paper from my postdoc days @mblscience.bsky.social and @zakswartz.bsky.social Lab is available in @natcomms.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... With Beverly Naigles, @carsten-wolff.bsky.social and @danivoronov.bsky.social

Three studies determined structures and performed complementary modeling and biochemical experiments for human and nonhuman primate opsins, providing molecular insight into how visual pigment absorption and activation kinetics are tuned. Learn more this week in Science: https://scim.ag/4amqrKh

Published today in Open Biology, our investigation of the evolutionary and functional significance of neuropeptide cocktails. Congrats to my co-author Nayeli Escudero Castelán and thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk and @ukri.org BBSRC for funding. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsob/article...

The evolution and functional significance of neuropeptide cocktails: insights from SALMFamides in asteroid echinoderms

Abstract. Neuropeptides derived from larger precursor proteins are neuronal signalling molecules that regulate physiological processes and behaviour. Some

royalsocietypublishing.org

In fact, a few years ago we followed the development of the Gene Network concept, tracing its continuity back to the work of Theodor Boveri. With @arnonelab.bsky.social and #Paola Oliveri. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A conceptual history of the “regulatory genome”: From Theodor Boveri to Eric Davidson

The formalization of the idea of “Regulatory Genome” is a recent one. However, it stems from a long tradition in the study of how the genetic informat…

sciencedirect.com

What is the evolutionary origin of the organizer? New work from @kremnyovs.bsky.social, @tclebedeva.bsky.social & Hejnol Lab @uni-jena.de reports the blastopore lip of the #ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, a member of the evolutionary sister group to all other metazoans, exhibits organizer activity.

A blastoporal organizer in a ctenophore - Nature

Experiments using the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi and the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveal that the emergence of a core signalling pathway may have been a key innovation enabling the transit...

nature.com

We had a blast at #EED2026 in Glasgow during our symposium on the Evolution and development of digestive systems. Thanks to the invited speakers @hejnol.bsky.social, @arnonelab.bsky.social, Stefano Vianello and Cat Schrankel for their precious contributions 🌟

10/10 Perhaps aggregation is not an evolutionary dead end after all! Perhaps it was one of the evolutionary experiments from which animal multicellularity emerged. Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @icreacommunity.bsky.social #AnimalOrigins #Evolution #Multicellularity

sPYce is now published in Nature Ecology and Evolution! sPYce is a method to integrate single-cell regulatory data across species, without requiring whole-genome alignments between species. More below ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

(1/2) What a fantastic week for the Arnone Lab at #EED2026 in Glasgow! Our lab’s work was showcased through contributed talks by @perievodevo.bsky.social in S19 and @mlrusciano.bsky.social in S02, as well as an invited talk by Ina in S15.

👨🏻‍🔬 Stefano is an invited speaker in the "Evolution and Development of Digestive Systems: from Specialised Cell Types to Complex Ecosystems" symposium, where he will share their work on the shared AP molecular blueprint of adult guts, from worm to clownfish (doi.org/10.1371/jour...). #EED2026 [2/3]

Capolavoro 🎨 alert 🚨! What is the role of gene body methylation in invertebrates? Despite extensive speculation linking it to plasticity and environmental responses, its mechanistic effects and heritability remain unclear. Our take out in @natecoevo.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

Gene body methylation suppresses intragenic transcription and permits epigenetic inheritance in a cnidarian - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Experiments in the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis show a role of gene body methylation in transposable element suppression and that epigenetic inheritance is constrained by chromatin context and tra...

nature.com

Please repost !! SANTA CRUZ DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY CONFERENCE 2026. Deadline to register your abstracts for the meeting is Monday June 1. Please get those abstracts in ! scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu

A fossil nervous system meets modern neurobiology. We found that a living comb jelly preserves neural architecture remarkably similar to those inferred from Cambrian fossils over 500 million years old 🤩. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/8 Inside your body lies something ancient. Our @pnas.org paper uncovers the deep unicellular prehistory of blood cell types. See paper and video. @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social @icreacommunity.bsky.social @prbb.org @csic.es @csicdivulga.bsky.social pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Issue 8 is now complete! On the cover: Embryos of diverse animals & choanoflagellates expressing different fluorescent reporters, from a project to identify membrane-localising tags across diverse organisms. See the Techniques and Resources Article by Karapidaki et al. doi.org/10.1242/dev....

One of my dream projects, ever since joining here in Basel, out now in @nature.com : single-cells 🤝 eco-morphological proxies rdcu.be/fiyso How cells and tissues adapt to dietary niches... Thanks and congrats to Antoine, Walter, and all the other co-authors for this great collaboration!! 🙏🥳

Adaptive cellular evolution in the intestine of hyperdiverse cichlid fishes

Nature - Single-cell transcriptomics combined with morphological and ecological data show that the rapid evolutionary radiation of cichlid fishes in Lake Tanganyika was accompanied by dietary...

rdcu.be

we're on the cover!

These images show live embryos of animals (jellyfish, crustacean, worm, sea urchin, sea squirt, beetle) and one of animals closest single-celled relatives. They were captured taking advantage of fluorescent proteins localised on the outer membrane of cells, allowing us to observe cell outlines. 1/9

I am honored to have been involved in this super cool open-science project. Thanks, Michalis!

Michalis Averof@michalis-averof.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Finding molecular tags that localise fluorescent proteins to the cell membrane was the goal of our latest paper, now published in Development @dev-journal.bsky.social. The tags act as address labels, sending proteins to the cell membrane, where they highlight the shape and arrangement of cells. 2/9

WAT www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New blog post: I got tired of having repetitive arguments explaining why I think it’s OK to be skeptical of LLMs for coding, so I wrote six and a half thousand words on the topic that I will be referring people to from now on. www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/...

In animals with large genomes, finding cis-regulatory elements can be very challenging. Enhancers can be located tens/hundreds of kb away from their target promoters. We face this challenge in Parhyale, with >3 Gbp genome. We just published a preprint describing how we are tackling this problem. /1