Happy #MicroscopyMonday! This video shows the first few minutes in the life of a sea star (Patiria miniata). Here, an oocyte has been hormonally activated to prepare for fertilization. Imaged by Colson Duncan and Feona Edwards, with help from Assistant Scientist Zak Swartz (@zakswartz.bsky.social).

Happy #MicroscopyMonday! This live image captures a larval sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) that refracts light like a gemstone. The vibrant, true-color image highlights the organism’s birefringence. Imaged by @shribak.bsky.social) and @karenecheverri.bsky.social from the MBL’s Bell Center.

National Egg Day celebrates the humble breakfast egg. But at the Marine Biological Laboratory, we’re taking a different spin and highlighting the eggs that help scientists better understand life itself.

⭐ Meet our first #NESM Spring Symposium Keynote: Zak Swartz! @zakswartz.bsky.social 📸: Live sea star oocyte 🟨 microtubules | 🟪 actin 🔬: Nikon / Yokogawa W1 spinning disk 🥼: Beverly Naigles 🌐: www.theswartzlab.org 🏛️: Marine Biological Laboratory @mblscience.bsky.social #MicroscopyMonday

Congratulations to Michael Wen and Andrew Gillis on this exciting paper out today! Shared competence forms the basis of gill arch and paired fin serial homology | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Shared competence forms the basis of gill arch and paired fin serial homology | PNAS

The origin of paired fins is an unresolved controversy in vertebrate evolutionary biology. Karl Gegenbaur famously proposed that paired fins evolve...

pnas.org

Notice of Award: we got a MIRA! This funding will allow us to continue our work on developmental polarization in oocytes here at @mblscience.bsky.social. We're grateful to the good folks at NIH/NIGMS for all their hard work. (sea star oocyte expressing Dishevelled-GFP in green)

Angelika showed us all how to pursue science with limitless enthusiasm, rigor, and generosity. Excited to announce the call for this year's Angelika Amon Young Scientist Award! Please encourage PhD students outside the United States who embody her infectious passion for biology to apply.

Destigmatize getting things wrong sometimes! Science can gracefully self-correct if we allow it. Well done all around. The cteno vs. sponge saga continues...

Yasin Dagdas@plantophagy.bsky.social · 6mo ago

This is a beautiful case of how real science happens & serious scientists work. Kudos to both set of authors: “This has been a humbling experience, but one that speaks to the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavor.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We are thrilled to invite you to the Michael Sars Symposium 2026 - Living systems in a variable ocean, together with our co-organizers at @cbubergen.bsky.social! Mark June 4, 2026 in your calendars, and watch out for our speaker lineup reveal in the new year 🙌

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

Felt a little festive at the microscope this morning for #FluorescenceFriday 🎄 Here’s the nervous system of a juvenile sea star ⭐️ Green = acetylated tubulin, red = nuclei Happy holidays!

We're approaching "I'm thrilled to announce" season on the socials, with the academic job cycle progressing along. Yes, it can be rough out there - *and you are doing awesome* - whether you land that interview or not! 👍💯 Happy holidays, all ⭐🐟

This controversy is such a rollercoaster... Yet, I'm hopeful we will come to a resolution soon-ish. People are coming up with bold new approaches (linkage, integrative phylogenomics), and while it takes inevitable time to identify their own pitfalls and artifacts, this is what progress looks like.

Max Telford@maxjtelford.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Some more shenanigans on the Ctenophora Porifera debate from @rcply.bsky.social academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

From an accidental discovery of hidden biology to a new framework to understanding and diagnosing rare disease. Thrilled to share the most recent work from our lab and the amazing Jimmy Ly. wi.mit.edu/news/alterna...

Alternate proteins from the same gene contribute differently to health and rare disease | Whitehead Institute

Iain Cheeseman and colleagues reveal the underappreciated role of single genes producing multiple proteins in atypical presentations of rare disease, and present case studies of affected patients thro...

wi.mit.edu

We built a targeted protein degradation–based system to mimic reproductive age-related aneuploidy in young eggs - revealing how chromosome errors associated with female infertility arise with age. 🧬✨ With @jiyeonleem.bsky.social and our team at Yale MCDB. Read: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

A versatile cohesion manipulation system probes female reproductive age-related egg aneuploidy - Nature Aging

To study pathways that lead to aneuploidy during aging, the authors provide a system that enables cohesion protein depletion in mouse oocytes, mimicking effects that occur during aging. They uncover a...

nature.com

Come work with us!

Marine Biological Laboratory@mblscience.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We are hiring! Interested? Apply here: go.mbl.edu/AS1887

New preprint! Graduate student Océane Marescal leverages quiescence - proliferative hibernation - to reveal unexpected dynamics for “constitutively”-localized centromere proteins. To understand the logic of cell division, you need to consider non-dividing cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The dynamics of centromere assembly and disassembly during quiescence

Quiescence is a state in which cells undergo a prolonged proliferative arrest while maintaining their capacity to reenter the cell cycle. Here, we analyze entry and exit from quiescence, focusing on h...

biorxiv.org

I hope to take a PhD student in 2026 to study siphonophores. Please reach out if you are interested in applying this fall. For examples of recent lab projects see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... and academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Population genomics of a sailing siphonophore reveals genetic structure in the open ocean

The open ocean is a vast, highly connected environment, and the organisms found there have been hypothesized to represent massive, well-mixed populati…

sciencedirect.com

Casey Dunn@caseywdunn.bsky.social · last yr.

I hope to take a PhD student in the coming application cycle. Please reach out if you are interested in joining our lab in EEB at Yale, especially if interested in working on the natural history/ phylogenetics/ morphology/ population biology/ development/ genomics of siphonophores. dunnlab.org

This postdoc position is still open! Apply if you want to come work with us on asymmetric cell divisions in spiralian embryos! postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

Barone Lab@baronelab.bsky.social · last yr.

Job Alert! We are recruiting one postdoc to work on spiralian embryos and their crazy polar lobes. More info about this HFSP-funded position on our website baronelab.org: scroll to the end, click on "this could be you"...start your adventure!

A little late with this one, but we got to go hunting for sea urchins on Gemma with the Semester in Biological Discovery (SBD) students. Thanks Captain David Bank and naturalist Scott Bennett, and Alex Megerle for the great writeup! 🌊🌊🌊 www.mbl.edu/news/close-u...

Up Close with Urchins: Undergrads Collect Lab Specimens on the Gemma | Marine Biological Laboratory

mbl.edu

Love this article! Feeling pumped to share the awesomeness of echinoderms again very soon in Embryology 2025

John Wallingford@jbwallingford.bsky.social · last yr.

What a fantastic essay by last year's @mblscience.bsky.social Embryology students! A perfect paean to the most wonderful science: "It's exhausting; it's exhilarating; it's Embryology." journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

We have shared detailed protocols for the expression, purification, and use of VitelloTag-Cas9 (in sea stars) on our website. We hope that this will be a useful starting place for working in your own favorite organism! www.theswartzlab.org/tools-and-pr...

Zak Swartz@zakswartz.bsky.social · last yr.

At last! The plasmids from our VitelloTag paper ( journals.biologists.com/dev/article/... ) are now available on Addgene: www.addgene.org/browse/artic... We hope they might be useful for you to deliver Cas9 in your favorite organism. Stay tuned for detailed protocols on our lab website.

At last! The plasmids from our VitelloTag paper ( journals.biologists.com/dev/article/... ) are now available on Addgene: www.addgene.org/browse/artic... We hope they might be useful for you to deliver Cas9 in your favorite organism. Stay tuned for detailed protocols on our lab website.

VitelloTag: a tool for high-throughput cargo delivery into oocytes

Summary: VitelloTag, a method for transporting protein cargo into oocytes, facilitates microinjection-free CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in multiple species.

journals.biologists.com

Another terrific Developmental Biology of the Sea Urchin & Other Marine Invertebrates is done! Thank you to all attendees for sharing your awesome science, the co-organizers for their hard work, our sponsors, and @mblscience.bsky.social for being such a great venue. Photo credit to Bob Morris 👏

Honored to have given the keynote lecture at the DBSUMI meeting. Such an exciting dev bio community! Thanks @zakswartz.bsky.social for the invitation and kind hospitality at wonderful @mblscience.bsky.social. The naturalist approach to science and rich history in this place are inspiring.

Also a blast from the past! Another preprint is now available from my first postdoc in the @arnonelab.bsky.social at @szndohrn.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Some good news during these difficult times. Please check out our new preprint. We built a new tool to probe the origins of high oocyte aneuploidy rates at advanced female reproductive ages. This NIH funded work was led by a fantastic postdoc in the lab, Jiyeon Leem. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A versatile cohesion manipulation system reveals CENP-A dysfunction accelerates female reproductive age-related egg aneuploidy.

Female reproductive aging is accompanied by a dramatic rise in the incidence of egg aneuploidy. Premature loss of chromosome cohesion proteins and untimely separation of chromosomes is thought to unde...

biorxiv.org

New preprint from my Postdoc in Zak Swartz’s lab at the @mblscience.bsky.social, in collaboration with Carsten Wolff and @. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint drop! Check out work from @jimmy-ly.bsky.social et al for how protein isoforms generated by alternate translation initiation create dual localization, contribute to mitochondrial function, and are mutated in disease. "Blue-tutorial" thread below. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Alternative start codon selection shapes mitochondrial function during evolution, homeostasis, and disease

Mitochondrial endosymbiosis was a pivotal event in eukaryotic evolution, requiring core proteins to adapt to function both within the mitochondria and in the host cell. Here, we systematically profile...

biorxiv.org

Iain Cheeseman@iaincheeseman.bsky.social · last yr.

Countdown to an epic new pre-print. Mitochondria are cells within our cells. They need the same core activities - replication, transcription, translation. How do cells enable these diverse activities in both compartments? We uncover an unexpected + broad strategy with ancient origins. Stay tuned!