Nikita Frolov 🇺🇦
@nikitaphysics.bsky.social
Physicist interested in complex living systems @lendertgelens.bsky.social Lab, KU Leuven Complex Systems | Systems Biology
📢🚨 We're hiring! Join my new computational biophysics team at @BirkbeckUoL to study the biomechanics of the kinetochore-microtubule complex using all-atom and coarse-grained MD. 24-month postdoc, London-based. Apply by 7th July: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRV016/p...
Postdoctoral Researcher at Birkbeck, University of London
Discover an exciting academic career path as a Postdoctoral Researcher at jobs.ac.uk. Don't miss out on this job opportunity - apply today!
jobs.ac.uk
Is it possible to create an artificial cell from scratch? What kind of design principles and constraints will be involved? How can physics and maths guide research? Check our @rsocpublishing.bsky.social paper, from chemistry to synthetic biology. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Synthetic protocell biology: from reproduction to computation | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Cells are the building blocks of biological complexity. They are complex systems sustained by the coordinated cooperative dynamics of several biochemical networks. Their replication, adaptation and co...
royalsocietypublishing.org
A smart city has nothing to do with artificial intelligence or sensors. A city is smart when children can walk and cycle freely and safely. Technology is only a bonus. 📸 Picture by @dutchcycling.nl
Congratulations, Gautam Dey and Omaya Dudin! The two collaborators have received the 2026 EMBO Gold Medal for outstanding contributions to the field of evolutionary cell biology. www.embl.org/news/awards-... @gautamdey.bsky.social @dudinlab.bsky.social @embo.org
Our latest manuscript on (Harry Potter and) the effect of elevated temperature on embryonic development in flies. Even a small increase in temperature causes developmental defects, indicating problems in the face of global warming! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Elevated temperature fatally disrupts nuclear divisions in the early Drosophila embryo - Nature Communications
Kale et al. show that nuclear divisions are defective at elevated temperature, leading to gastrulation defects and embryo lethality. Their work finds that F-actin – microtubule interactions during mit...
nature.com
1/35 New preprint! We show that obligate multicellularity removes fundamental population genetic barriers to multicellular adaptation. Even a brief unicellular phase can dramatically constrain the evolution of beneficial multicellular traits. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Obligate multicellularity circumvents population genetic barriers to collective-level adaptation
Complex multicellularity has evolved in just five lineages (animals, plants, brown algae, red algae, and fungi) and in each case, these organisms develop clonally and are obligately multicellular. While prior work has shown that clonal development plays a critical role in the evolution of complex multicellularity, none has disentangled this from the impact of obligate vs facultative multicellular life cycles. Here we use experimental evolution with engineered snowflake yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae ) to directly test how life cycle structure affects multicellular adaptation. We created isogenic strains capable of switching between unicellular and clonal multicellular phases, then evolved populations for 192 days under obligately multicellular, facultatively multicellular, and obligately unicellular regimes. Obligately multicellular populations rapidly evolved larger size, primarily driven by a whole genome duplication, in all five replicates. Facultative populations showed dramatically constrained evolution, with tetraploidy evolving in only 2/10 facultative populations despite experiments demonstrating that it is strongly beneficial across the full life cycle. Mathematical modeling reveals the mechanistic basis for this constraint: facultative life cycles create establishment barriers through two population genetic effects. Group formation dramatically reduces the number of units of selection, making beneficial multicellular mutations vulnerable to drift. This asymmetry in population size between life cycle phases also allows cell-level selection to overpower group-level selection, eliminating mutations that provide group-level benefits but carry cell-level costs. These findings demonstrate that obligate multicellularity circumvents fundamental population genetic barriers to collective-level adaptation, helping explain why complex multicellularity has evolved exclusively in obligately multicellular lineages, and suggesting similar constraints may operate in other evolutionary transitions in individuality. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. U.S. National Science Foundation, https://ror.org/021nxhr62, DEB-1845363 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Gilliam Fellowship National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
biorxiv.org
Fever - friend or foe? Happy to announce our International Marsilius Academy Feel the Heat – Science and Histories of Fever 📅 20–25 September 2026 | Marsilius Kolleg, Heidelberg ⏰ Application deadline: 14 June 2026 👉 More information and application: lnkd.in/eEmXDYgZ
Glad to see this out in its final form! www.nature.com/articles/s41... What changed since the preprint? Wonderful experiments disentangling the effect of receptor binding vs tissue porosity on Nodal diffusion, plus one of the smoothest review experiences! Thanks @natcellbio.nature.com & reviewers 🙏
Tissue rigidity phase transition shapes morphogen gradients - Nature Cell Biology
Autorino et al. report a feedback loop between Nodal signalling and tissue phase transitions in zebrafish embryos. Nodal alters adhesion, triggering tissue rigidification and reduced porosity, which l...
nature.com
Nicoletta Petridou@nicolettapetridou.bsky.social · last yr.Here our latest work on how morphogens trigger tissue phase transitions to tune their own length-scales and time-scales - An exciting collaboration with @zhvas.bsky.social @dianakhorom.bsky.social Bernat Corominas-Murtra and heroic experiments by the incredible @cami-autorino.bsky.social @embl.org
Summer is coming, but how will you maximize your picnic space when everyone else is doing the same? In our new preprint, we show that branched cells may have an elegant solution: As cells grow and repel neighbors, they don't just cover space, but reach a hidden order called hyperuniformity! 🧪⚛️
How can we measure increased productivity of scientists, as a whole, whether from more AI, more funding or other measures, if the total number of Nature papers per week always stays the same?
Sign up by 27 May for the EMBO Solutions #training "How to write a scientific paper" delivered by @embopress.org editors at the upcoming meeting: www.embl.org/about/info/c... 🧪 @embolableadership.bsky.social @embl.org #EESMicrotubules #EMBOevents
I am happy that our 2-part review of different approaches to modeling temperature effects in biological systems is out online! Want to know more? Read this nice summary by @lendertgelens.bsky.social and dive into our articles 😉
Lendert Gelens@lendertgelens.bsky.social · 4mo agoTemperature affects all biological rates, but how do we model its effects? Our 2-part review brings together modeling approaches from empirical curve fits to microscopic kinetics to network-level dynamics 🧵 Part I: doi.org/10.1016/j.coisb.2026.100577 Part II: doi.org/10.1016/j.coisb.2026.100578
Flexing with my oldest and our Newroz (neurosis) in Dresden
Meeting great-grandparent @ Berlin Museum für Naturkunde
A question I get asked all the time by @dev-journal.bsky.social authors "Why does it cost so much to publish a paper?" We break down the finances and explain where the money goes Spoiler: quality publishing takes a village (people + infrastructure) journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...
‘Why is publishing so expensive?’
For many of us who work in scientific publishing, the title of this Editorial is a question we hear all the time when we're out talking to academics. And it's a perfectly reasonable one. After all, re...
journals.biologists.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Compartmentalized cytoplasmic tradewinds direct soluble proteins - Nature Communications
Cells use fluid flow to deliver proteins to their leading edge. An actin barrier creates a compartment where contraction drives flow, steering proteins toward growing regions. This mechanism coordinat...
nature.com
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
Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations
Nature Reviews Genetics - In this Perspective, Maizels and Briscoe discuss the limitations of current models of gene regulatory networks and outline solutions to harness data abundance without...
rdcu.be
Latest work from the lab by Aude Nommick et al., in which we propose a "size-scaling" model for microtubule force exertion that regulates centrosome centration vs decentration during embryo development! @ijmonod.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Happy to highlight our collaborative work from our @ijmonod.bsky.social team with @destriano.bsky.social, B. Goyeau and M. Chabanon. Cytoplasmic crowding acts as a porous medium that hinders macromolecular diffusivity. Plus: a clever way to measure cell volume. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Cytoplasmic crowding acts as a porous medium reducing macromolecule diffusion | PNAS
Intracellular transport of macromolecules is crucial for the proper functioning of most cellular processes. Although intracellular crowding is know...
pnas.org
Our review on Marr's levels in embryonic development is now out in @prxlife.bsky.social ! journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...
David Brückner@davidbrueckner.bsky.social · 9mo agoHow can we organize current theoretical approaches for developmental biology - from information to dynamical systems & GRNs - into a common framework? We propose to think along Marr's 3 levels: computational problem, algorithm, implementation Check out our review: arxiv.org/abs/2510.24536
#LivingArchitectures We put cells and cytoskeleton filaments on the architecture of the musée d'Orsay. www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/agenda/ev... Scientists of the #CytoMorphoLab adapted their protocols to illustrate the questions that keep them awake at night. -> Two shows on the 24th and 25th of January.
Come join us in beautiful Roscoff for this Conference Jacques Monod on Developmental regulation: from molecular to ecological niches May 18-22, 2026 Roscoff, France Abstract deadline: January 31, 2026 Apply here: cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en
Insightful talk with many amazing pictures of microtubule-motor patterning by Manuel Théry @manuelthery.bsky.social at the Paris Cytoskeleton Day 2025
Finally out in #PRXLife: our theory on the effect of temperature on the completion time of large networks. Using graph theory, one can show that the Arrhenius plot is quadratic, in excellent agreement with experimental data from fly development. Read the open access paper here: go.aps.org/48brig2
Preprint 🚨! B cells form localized patterns in the immune synapse when mature, allowing improved affinity discrimination. How? We suggest a new mechanism using dynamic active forces and feedback! Read more @ arxiv.org/abs/2510.18771. Great colab with Shenshen Wang, Tom Chou and Tony Wong (UCLA).
🚨 Late preprint alert! Why do biological process rates scale nonlinearly with temperature, deviating from the straight line on an Arrhenius plot? The key may lie in their inherent complexity! More in thread and here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Last year at EMBL, Prof. McIntosh gave a historical overview of the discovery of dynamical instability, and it was one of the most insightful and fun lectures I've ever listened to. Really excited to read this piece from him.
Journal of Cell Biology@jcb.org · 10mo agoPerspective from Richard McIntosh describing the history of research on #microtubule polymerization in terms of the ideas, technologies, and observations that have emerged as countless researchers have studied the dynamics of these essential cytoskeletal polymers. rupress.org/jcb/article/...
