Thrilled that our recent paper has received the SBMS November 2025 Paper of the Month award. Grateful for this recognition, to the entire team for their hard work, and to my mentor @vaishananth.bsky.social , for her constant support. www.cell.com/current-biol...
Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan (She/Her)
@vaishananth.bsky.social
EMBLAustralia Group Leader @ UNSW Sydney| Ex Asst Prof IISc Bangalore | EMBO YI 2018 | MPI-CBG Dresden & BITS Pilani alumna | Co-founder @ biaswatchindia | Ally 🏳️🌈
If anyone wondering about academic funding in Aus, this is the stark reality at present. I have written countless letters to politicians like @mehreenfaruqi.bsky.social, @davidpocock.bsky.social who like to say they are leading this conversation in Aus but it is really like shouting into the void.
Australian #NHMRC Ideas grants are out. 8.1% success rate. Lowest since the scheme began. Congrats to the successful few, as it looks like less than 200 were funded. 🧪
The Leading Edge Fellows gathered this week to celebrate Zara Weinberg, a beloved member of our community. Our 7th cohort of Leading Edge Fellows (2026) will be named in her honor. The Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Cohort application is now open! Due Feb 2. www.leadingedgesymposium.org/apply/
🚨Our collaboration with @centriolelab.bsky.social & @gautamdey.bsky.social is out today in @cp-cell.bsky.social We show that #Expansion #Microscopy is a broad-spectrum modality for Euks, enabling 3D phenotypic maps rooted to phylogeny. #ProtistsOnSky #SciComm #SciSky www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
📣 We are hiring! An education-focused Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Biomedical or Biophysical sciences. It’s a chance to be a part of a team of single molecule /cellular biophysicists building a brand new undergraduate curriculum, here at UNSW in sunny Sydney. Happy to answer queries.
Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Biomedical Sciences (Education focused)
The incumbent will contribute to undergraduate teaching in biophysics or quantitative biomedical sciences within the School of Biomedical Sciences.
external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au
Thrilled to share that this work has been accepted for publication @currentbiology.bsky.social 🥳 Special shoutout to the editorial team – the process was incredibly smooth and productive. Read more here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Mitochondrial function regulates cell growth kinetics to maintain mitochondrial homeostasis
Mitochondria are not produced de novo in newly divided daughter cells but are inherited from the mother cell during mitosis. While mitochondrial homeo…
sciencedirect.com
How is mitochondrial volume maintained across successive generations of dividing cells? In our new preprint, we show how fission yeast cells use mitochondrial activity to control division timing and maintain mitochondrial homeostasis! (1/n) 📖 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
My first post on Bluesky! Very excited to share our work just published in @science.org. We find that “Interphase cell morphology defines the mode, symmetry, and outcome of mitosis” - in angiogenesis and other tissues! www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1... www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Interphase cell morphology defines the mode, symmetry, and outcome of mitosis
During tissue formation, dynamic cell shape changes drive morphogenesis while asymmetric divisions create cellular diversity. We found that the shifts in cell morphology that shape tissues could conco...
science.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
@ucsusa.bsky.social is running a "science advocacy training webinar on writing letters to the editor to inform and influence different audiences about the impacts of federal cuts to science and science workers" next Thursday April 17 🧪 It will be recorded for those who register but cannot attend
Sharing Stories of Science through Letters to the Editor
The Union of Concerned Scientists invites scientists and experts to a science advocacy training webinar on writing letters to the editor to inform and influence different audiences about the impacts o...
secure.ucs.org
We're disappointed to see Ben Barres's powerful book "The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" among the ~400 titles removed from the Naval Academy Library. Needless to say, we're proud to have published his book and will keep it — and his memory — alive.
The Coming Out of a Transgender Scientist
"I know that I am making the right decision because whenever I think about changing my gender role, I am flooded with feelings of relief."
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
REPOSTING this here just to officially leave "the other place" Our work on the role of endogenous electric fields in guiding collective cell migration during #morphogenesis is out @naturematerials.bsky.social nature.com/articles/s41...
Stretch-induced endogenous electric fields drive directed collective cell migration in vivo - Nature Materials
Electric fields guide collective cell migration in developing embryos of Xenopus laevis via a voltage-sensitive phosphatase.
nature.com
How is mitochondrial volume maintained across successive generations of dividing cells? In our new preprint, we show how fission yeast cells use mitochondrial activity to control division timing and maintain mitochondrial homeostasis! (1/n) 📖 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
openRxiv has arrived! We’re thrilled to announce the launch of openRxiv as an independent, researcher-led nonprofit to oversee bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world’s leading preprint servers for life and health sciences. openrxiv.org/introducing-... #openRxiv #OpenScience #Preprints #bioRxiv #medRxiv
Posting this here now that the orange man has erasing scientific literature. What people, perhaps without any strong opinions on this, never understand is the barriers that academics have to overcome to publish papers on gender and trans identities. He can burn the journals, but we will keep PDFs 😘
It feels like such irony when a group of us were writing this article to Cell, and were told by the American higher-ups of the journal to soften the language. e.g. we were asked to omit the word, "radical" which appeared once in the paper just so it won't offend any one. That was <12 mths ago.
Aaaand that’s a wrap at Asia Pacific Microscopy Congress 2025 in sunny Brisbane, attended by a big team from Single Molecule Science. Lots of exciting new 🔬 tools and translation in biomedical investigations. @ijayas.bsky.social @arindam92.bsky.social
U2OS labeled with OMP25-GFP, an outer membrane marker for mitochondria. Left shows a zoom-in on the dimmer cell. Imaged by OPM (oblique plane microscope). #Microscopy
Reading the paper in Cell about how to close the scissor plots in gender representation at senior academic positions, I feel just a touch of pessimism. Having reached a level of seniority (middle management) I didn’t think I ever would, I read these great ideas wanting more, much more /1.
Closing the scissor-shaped curve: Strategies to promote gender equality in academia
Gender inequality in STEM fields remains pervasive and undermines the ability for talented individuals to excel. Despite advances, women still encounter obstacles in pursuing academic careers and reac...
cell.com
My lab at UMass Chan Med School uses a variety of approaches to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of membrane traffic. Striving to make academic science a more diverse, equitable, welcoming and inclusive place. Incoming President for the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB)! Opinions are mine.
I am delighted to share our new preprint in which we reveal the crucial role for mechanical forces in myoblast fusion. Great work from Yoann, Sushil and Aleksandra and great collaboration with Christophe Marcelle and Amin Doostmohammadi! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Non-native English speakers need 50% more time to write a paper When they do, they face a 2.5 times higher chance of being rejected because of language journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
I agree with @wallaceucsf.bsky.social's great synthesis here, it's a super exciting time for physical biology! We are in the process of transitioning from simply cataloguing the parts to actually understanding how they interact to produce the high-level behaviors we see.
Super cool work! Congrats to the authors!
How do organelles fit together inside a crowded cell? Answering this question requires a way to image many organelles in a whole cell at high resolution with high throughput. Our new preprint shows how to do this in yeast using soft x-ray tomography www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
So proud of Adam Fenton and his work defining the role of FMRP in the local regulation of mitochondrial fission in neurons via local translation: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
FMRP regulates MFF translation to locally direct mitochondrial fission in neurons - Nature Cell Biology
Fenton et al. show that FMRP granules dock at the mitochondrial midzone in a Rab7-dependent manner in axons and dendrites, where they promote local MFF synthesis and fission at the mitochondrial midzo...
nature.com
I *see* you BSKY. Cleared #lightsheet #microscopy of the human #eye from Marie Darche in Paris and rendered in www.syglass.io.
Check out our new quick guide in @currentbiology.bsky.social, all about Mitochondrial Nucleoids! t.co/QFTQrevZNu
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2824%2901346-0
t.co
Super excited to see all this activity on BlueSky! 👋 I'm a cell biologist/biophysicist interested in how the cell interior is organised by stochastic interactions between the cytoskeleton, motor proteins and organelles. I also care deeply about equity and inclusion in academia. 1/2
So happy to see familiar faces again! ❤️ For the new folks - I'm a neuroscientist by training and I'm passionate about scicomm and women in STEM. Previous works in this space include indscicomm.blog with @abhishekchari.bsky.social and biaswatchindia.com with @vaishananth.bsky.social
IndSciComm
Innovating Scicomm for India
indscicomm.blog
Final week for applications for up to 2 postdoc posts in advanced biomedical (super-resolution) microscopy with my team in Sydney, based at @singmolsci.bsky.social. The post is especially suited for ECRs interested in single molecule imaging, &/or image analysis. International applicants welcome 🧪
Post-Doctoral Fellow in Advanced Biomedical Microscopy
UNSW Department of Molecular Medicine seeks an enthusiastic researcher in super-resolution microscopy to develop novel super resolution methods and leverage these techniques to study cellular architec...
external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au