Timothée Lionnet

@successprocess.bsky.social

faculty at NYU School of Medicine. We use advanced microscopy techniques to understand gene expression. Opinions my own. timotheelionnet.net

We would like to add one or two postdocs to our lab in the next couple of years. If you are close to finishing your PhD and interested in the science we do, feel free to reach out to discuss opportunities.

How do nuclear compartments form inside cell nuclei? We show RNA glues certain loci together to form a nuclear compartment. This involves special GC-rich regions of highly expressed genes that also associate with nuclear speckles, but interactions between these loci are independent of speckles!

bioRxiv Genomics@biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · 5d ago

Formation of an RNA-mediated nuclear compartment https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.20.746005v1

In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵

The average CD_5 index per year for Web of Science. The original Park et al. decline (top curve) becomes essentially flat (bottom curve) when removing papers with CD_5=1. Those papers largely correspond to dataset artefacts.

Excited to share our newest work! We asked whether RNA molecules need to be in a specific place in the cell to do their job. We found that a single RNA must reach the midbody, the structure that pinches two dividing cells apart, for cell division to finish efficiently. 🧵⬇️

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(1/4) We are very excited to share our latest preprint from @sauer-lab.bsky.social: Mega Expansion Microscopy (Mega-ExM)! We combine iterative hydrogel expansion with whole-proteome NHS labeling and post-expansion immunostaining, reaching tunable expansion factors up to ~1500× in whole cells 🤯

bioRxiv Biophysics@biorxiv-biophys.bsky.social · 3w ago

Structural cell biology by mega-expansion microscopy https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.05.743040v1

One thing strikes me : while LLMs now seem to excel in maths, they have yet to produce any great book (despite having been trained on virtually everything available that was ever written, and having been used to produce text for several years now).

Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 4w ago

Clearly AI is proving useful in advanced mathematics. But to what degree and of what import remains hazy to me. This article provides a nice entry point into the latest developments.

New paper 🧵 What if the "landscape" that guides cell differentiation isn't fixed, but is sculpted, in real time, by the very cells moving through it? We call this a 'sandscape' : grains of sand that carve dunes as they move, while the dunes' shape simultaneously steers where the grains go next.

New review in Nature Reviews Cancer: "Imaging the hallmarks of cancer." A collaborative effort to map non-invasive clinically relevant in vivo imaging onto every cancer hallmark, separating what can be seen directly from what is only accessible via surrogates. 🧵 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Imaging the hallmarks of cancer - Nature Reviews Cancer

In this Review, Grimm et al. describe the range of non-invasive diagnostic imaging approaches to monitor the various hallmarks of cancer and how their implementation is shaping clinical practice.

doi.org

1/🧵 Can transcription factor condensate formation be explained without phase separation? Our new preprint introduces SPARK, a simulation tool that reproduces condensate behavior (clustering, fusion, FRAP) from diffusion & binding kinetics alone. Movie: 60 sec FRAP sim www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Help please! We need to do some large(ish) cell culture inhibiting E-cadherin with a monoclonal antibody. Does anyone have the DECMA-1 hybridoma cell line so we could purify our own antibody? or a similar monoclonal that would do the job. Any help greatly appreciated, just DM me. Please repost!

Cells are not just bags of molecules. Function depends on spatial interactions: RNAs and/or proteins come together with interaction partners to drive regulation and function. In our new preprint, we introduce ProPER, a novel method for in situ proximity detection. Preprint: tinyurl.com/muju86s6

Jorge Trojanowski@jorgetrojanowski.bsky.social · 4mo ago

1/ ProPER - Our novel ligation-free proximity detection method for efficient multiplexed imaging of molecular interactions in situ. Among other things we use it to image the life cycle of RNA molecules and resolve differential kinetics of gene expression steps. New preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...