🎉 We are thrilled to announce the very first winner of the BSDB Marie Johansson Prize! This year’s award goes to Giulia Boezio @giulia-boezio.bsky.social, recognised for outstanding contributions to developmental biology and for embodying Marie’s scientific originality and rigour.

Huge congratulations to James Briscoe @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social for receiving the 2026 BSDB Waddington Medal, recognising an extraordinary career of discovery, mentorship, and leadership in developmental biology. bsdb.org/2026/03/24/2...

2026 Waddington Medal Winner - James Briscoe - BSDB - British Society for Developmental Biology

We are very pleased to announce that this year’s Waddington medal winner is James Briscoe. His fundamental discoveries have helped shape our understanding of of how morphogens work, and he has played ...

bsdb.org

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 · 6mo 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

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 · 6mo 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

Genomes? Pah, who needs them... let's delete them!

Leopold Parts@leopoldparts.bsky.social · 10mo ago

New 🧬✂️ pre-print! We show that paired prime editing can efficiently generate large deletions — even >1 Mb — with high precision and at scale. We use this to perform the first pooled prime deletion screen across the human genome. 🔗 biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread (by Juliane Weller)👇

actually courtesy of @arjunraj.bsky.social!

Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 11mo ago

The biologist's view of how flight works. Courtesy of Rory Maizels. #GenerativeBiology

Heroic winner of the IgNobel prize for biology: paint zebra stripes on cows to stop them getting bitten journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

. sjablonen 11 .

The failures of language in biology -- and the most apt description of biology I know: it is difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis

sciencedirect.com

'It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.' As true for stem cells as for humans!

Ollie Inge@oliveringe.bsky.social · last yr.

1/7 Really happy to see my PhD work published in ✨Developmental Cell✨ today! We find human endoderm is specified by two developmental trajectories 🔀, and the choice between alternate routes is dictated by the combinatorial BMP4/Activin signalling. www.cell.com/developmenta...

I said some things about my PhD, and now they've appeared here. How fun!

the Node@the-node.bsky.social · last yr.

👀Interview with @bsdb.bsky.social Beddington medal winner @rorymaizels.bsky.social We caught up with Rory to discuss his career path, his PhD with @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social and what he is excited about in #devbio. thenode.biologists.com/an-interview...

Neuronal diversity is written in transcriptional codes 🧬. But what is the logic of these codes that define cell types and wiring patterns? To find out we built a #scRNAseq developmental atlas of the Drosophila nerve cord and linked it to the #connectome 🪰🧠 #preprint thread ⬇️1/8

Excited to share our paper on deciphering the design & control principles of tissue scaling w/ Luisa Arispe! Amazing work by co-first authors Danielle Pi and Jonas Braun. We show *differentiated* endothelial cell proliferate in waves with ultrafast cell cycle time of ~5h www.cell.com/cell-systems...

Just published: The cis-regulatory logic integrating spatial and temporal patterning in the vertebrate neural tube A global temporal chromatin program, operating across the CNS, directs binding of specific spatial TFs & hence when/where neurons & glia are born authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

No new genes needed to fly - just rewire what you have! 🦇🧬 Great new paper from the labs of @fany-real.bsky.social @stemundi.bsky.social @dariloops.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415... #EvoDevo #SingleCell #BatWings

Comparative single-cell analyses reveal evolutionary repurposing of a conserved gene programme in bat wing development - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Single-cell comparison of developing bat and mouse limbs reveals conservation of cell populations and gene expression patterns, and suggests repurposing of genes involved in proximal limb development ...

doi.org

Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics@molgen.mpg.de · last yr.

How did the bat get its wings? New research from a collaboration between the labs of Stefan Mundlos (MPIMG), Dario G. Lupiáñez, and Francisca M. Real (@cabd-upo-csic.bsky.social) show how genetic programs were reused during the evolution of mammalian flight. --> www.molgen.mpg.de/news-2025-fl...

Measuring properties of individual cells in relation to their neighbors in 3D tissues is challenging. @cellysally.bsky.social &co develop a computational toolkit to facilitate this, analyzing developmental patterning in mouse, chick & #Drosophila #embryo @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4lQMeNu

genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... Quite an indictment of some of the current single cell "virtual cell" foundation models. Even for the relatively mundane applications, cell labeling, batch correction etc, they are poor compared to much simpler & cheaper methods.

Zero-shot evaluation reveals limitations of single-cell foundation models - Genome Biology

Foundation models such as scGPT and Geneformer have not been rigorously evaluated in a setting where they are used without any further training (i.e., zero-shot). Understanding the performance of mode...

genomebiology.biomedcentral.com

Our latest "Dynamic Landscape Analysis of Cell Fate Decisions: Predictive Models of Neural Development From Single-Cell Data" A rigorous mathematical foundation for Waddington's landscape to study cell fate decision making Applied to ventral neural tube development www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Dynamic Landscape Analysis of Cell Fate Decisions: Predictive Models of Neural Development From Single-Cell Data

Building a mechanistic understanding of cell fate decisions remains a fundamental goal of developmental biology, with implications for stem cell therapies, regenerative medicine and understanding dise...

biorxiv.org

Congratulations to Tiago Rito @ritolab.bsky.social starting his own research group at Hong Kong U

Tissue Design Lab @HKU@ritolab.bsky.social · last yr.

🚀🚀 I'm starting my own lab @ HKU ! ! The lab will be investigating how cells build complex tissues — with a focus on tissue boundaries, niche establishment, and many open questions sparked by our recent work on trunk-organoids rdcu.be/eqsho 🫡🫡