The final form of my 2nd postdoc paper with the Bassler Lab! Turns out our favorite quorum-sensing phage isn’t a one-off, but rather a member of a globally dispersed family of phages that sense a universal autoinducer. #phagesky #microsky journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Lab re-union at #cellbio2025 - great to see everyone again and hear about the interesting new science they are doing!

The cell is a crowded place where organelles are packed together . In her talk this afternoon Dec 9 at CellBio2025 in the Quantitative Modeling session room 122, Mary Mirvis will show her work using soft x-ray tomography to explore how packing interactions affect organelle shape and interaction.

The cell is a crowded place where organelles are packed together . In poster B365 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8 in the Quantitative Modeling session room 122, Mary Mirvis uses soft x-ray tomography to explore how packing interactions affect organelle shape and interaction.

Mitochondria form dynamic networks that can be represented as graphs. But the space of graphs is complex. In poster 376 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8, Raphie Mostov presents a mathematical approach to represent mitochondria far more simply.

Stentor is a single cell with a complex cortical pattern showing anterior/posterior polarization In poster 410 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8, Yina Hudnall shows a role for posterior-enriched mRNA that encoding DNA binding proteins.

Stentor is a single cell that can regenerate missing pieces, but how does it know when something is missing? In poster 406 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8, Connie Yan shows that conserved cell cycle machinery plays a key role in triggering cellular regeneration.

The giant ciliate Stentor has a macronucleus that undergoes a dramatic shape change during cellular regeneration. In poster 038 at CellBio2025 Monday Dec 8, I present work by Isabella Ibalio showing that histone modifications correlate with these dramatic nuclear shape changes.

Flagellar length control in Chlamydomonas is a paradigm for organelle size regulation. In poster 163 at CellBio2025 Sunday Dec 7, I present work by Hiro Ishikawa using a synthetic biology approach to test a length-sensing model based on diffusion of kinesin in flagella

Flagellar length control in Chlamydomonas is a paradigm for organelle size regulation. In poster 155 at the CellBio2025 meeting Sunday Dec 7, Ximena Garcia Arceo uses Lithium, which increases intraflagellar transport, as a tool to probe how length-altering mutants work.

The low Reynolds number of cytoplasmic flow which makes mixing hard. In poster 359 at the CellBio2025 meeting Sunday Dec 7, Ulises Diaz shows how giant cells leverage reversible actin gel assembly to drive rapid mixing of cytoplasm, faster even than "chaotic mixing" schemes.

Cells can hunt prey, solve mazes, and learn from past experience. Does this mean they can think, at some level? Find out more at our upcoming session on "Cell Behavior and Cognition" at the ASCB/EMBO #cellbio2025 meeting, Saturday 1-3 pm rm 115.

Reach out and touch somebody’s future organelle? Make this place a better world, if you can.

My first ever time doing a podcast - part of “that’s absurd, please elaborate”, recorded live at the Bay Area Science Festival. thatsabsurdshow.com Discussing two topics- does saturable transport mean you can eat as much as you want? and what would happen if tardigrades were a lot bigger?

Check out that spindle 🤩🔥 At 63C, most eukaryotic cells would be busy exploding noisily, forget even trying to divide. The microbial universe never ceases to astound 😍 Thanks for letting us be a tiny part of this! #ExpandThemAll

“You’re a stupid person” — Trump lashes out at a reporter who presses him on the fact that the suspected DC shooter was actually thoroughly vetted before he was let in the US from Afghanistan

Some cells are just in it for the drama! The bottom 5 microns of cells videoed through a microscope by @EmmaKoory. The middle cell rounds up (for fun?) and subsequently rounds up to divide. We missed so much of the action by just sampling the bottom. @CellBiology

SEN. KELLY : “They informed me of this in a tweet because this is not about the law. This is about the media cycle, and intimidation… We basically repeated the uniform code of military justice, and they're saying that's in violation of it. It's absurd. Comical.”

Weird word of the day: "kleptosquamy." The testate amoeba Awerintzewia cyclostoma steals scales from other amoeboid organisms to build its own shell. This one has robbed Quadrulella, Netzelia, various euglyphids, and even an Acanthocystis. Kleptosquamy! #amoebae #ProtistsOnSky #biology #nature

now i've seen everything... 😱 don't care what anybody says but #protists are cognitive

Students attending the departmental seminar just for the refreshments

Good morning to all those people who wasted the last decade saying, "there's no point tackling climate change in the UK, because China." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Wound healing is a hallmark feature of all life, including single cells. In a new preprint, Ambika Nadkarni @biochembika.bsky.social investigates a new dimension in cellular wound healing: how cells recover AFTER the wound has been closed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Garfield is the guy, actually he's called Garfield's monster

Same - solutions?

Trump tries to build a fake wall of inevitability around everything he does. Today, voters - literally from sea to shining sea - broke through all that, and this is just the beginning.

Congratulations to all the Democratic candidates who won tonight. It’s a reminder that when we come together around strong, forward-looking leaders who care about the issues that matter, we can win. We’ve still got plenty of work to do, but the future looks a little bit brighter.

Fastest half - but still very slow…

Almost show-time at the Bay Area Science Festival. Come see how cells can learn! If you can’t make it, you can find out about the super-powers of time organisms at the Nature’s Tiny Marvels web site: sites.google.com/view/natures...

“having children play with the Lego set before their own MRI scans has significantly helped decrease anxiety and increase familiarity with the procedure.” www.cnbc.com/2025/10/13/l...

Weekend fun little project - my first foray into LED-DTL logic which uses the large voltage drop of an LED to simplify the classic “diode-transistor logic”. Here is an AND gate

Our collaboration with @mbonhivers.bsky.social is now out in @plosbiology.org! 🎉Using U-ExM, we mapped the formation of the flagellar pocket collar in T. brucei. Huge thanks to everyone involved — one step closer to #PhDone! #ExM #oneringtorulethemall #Bilbo1 #trypanosoma #protistsonsky

Are you in/near the SF Bay Area? Do you like Science? What about Festivals? Then you might want to check out the Bay Area Science Festival Oct 25. I’ll be there showing how single cells can learn! www.bayareasciencefestival.org

had a fun joint opening lecture for #UCSFTetrad Cellbio course with @nachury - but a question arose about eukaryotic evolution: if asgards used symbiotic bacteria for respiration, is there similarity with how RBCs use the liver for respiration? is the alanine cycle a vestige of eukaryogenesis?

A molecular-resolution look into the near-native architecture of the spinach chloroplast🌱. This one was a long time in the oven, but we're happy to finally share our "version of record". What long-standing debates did we settle? Check back for a short thread🧵 on Monday. #TeamTomo #PlantScience 🧪🧶🧬🔬🌾

Again I am years behind: I have only recently noticed that critical information such as equal-contribution authorship is lost in important platforms such as PubMed, Google Scholar, ORCID... Fairness is critical to every one. Why nothing has been done to correct this? Something needs to be done!

Proud (and surprised) to be awarded a UCSF Medical School Excellence in Teaching Award! Celebrating here with my REGN module colleagues Igor Mitrovic and Kathy Hyland

The link seems to have changed please check it out here. www.ascb.org/society-news...

Next week, we have Ulises Diaz from UCSF giving us a talk in the Physical Properties of the Cytoplasm online seminar series. For more info, visit cytophys.org. Join us.

congratulations to vincentv boudreau and @aralbright.bsky.social for winning the MBoC Paper of the Year award from @ASCBiology for their work on the cell biology and genome of Stentor pyriformis www.ascb.org/society-news...

New preprint! 🚨 We uncover a slow adaptation to stretch that links star-bundling of keratin filaments with nuclear escape from its keratin cage. Led by @tomgolde.bsky.social‬ 🙌 @IBECBarcelona www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do microbes become permanent partners? 🌊🔬🦠 Check out our new study published in Current Biology showing how cyanobacterial genomes evolve step-by-step into endosymbionts of diatoms. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @currentbiology.bsky.social @mehrshmali.bsky.social

The Ulva-covered sea steps of Venice. Hard to believe each green sheet is only two cell layers thick!

Cells can form patterns within themselves just like embryos do. How? Connie Yan's new preprint shows how the anterior-posterior cytoskeleton pattern in Stentor is dictated by regionalized scaffolding proteins www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Day 2 of the Venice Summer School on Emergence and Evolution of Multi-Level Regulatory Systems. Morning lecture by Nicole King on origins of multicellularity. Web site for the summer school meetings.embo.org/event/25-mul...

Day 2 of the Venice Summer School on Emergence and Evolution of Multi-Level Regulatory Systems. Morning lecture by Nicole Kingb on origins of multicellularity. Web site for the summer school meetings.embo.org/event/25-mul...

Yogi Jaeger kicking off the Venice Summer School in Emergence and Evolution