So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

The lab’s first pre-print! We investigated how growth-inducing Erk activity waves are regulated in regenerating zebrafish scales. We discovered that Erk waves are followed by waves of expression of their own inhibitors, as predicted by excitable waves theory. tinyurl.com/26r2cmpj

Domesticated animals have pulled our heavy carts and turned our large mills for centuries. But what about the opposite end of the spectrum—what if the wheel you want to turn is so small you can’t see it? Turns out we can harness the power of bacteria to power the world’s smallest machines. 1/7 ⚛️🧪

Great Job - Great Colleagues - Great Science👍 Help us pick the next generation of @hhmi.org Investigators, Freeman Hrabowski Scholars, Hanna Gray Fellows, Gilliam Fellows Relocation to DC is required, perfect for academic PIs looking for their next chapter hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...

Want to get started with smart microscopy? 🧠🔬 Check out our online repository with implementations from labs and industry -- lots of practical tips and links to sample code! smartmicroscopy.github.io/implementati... More details in the ✨updated preprint!✨ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚀 Our new paper is out @natmethods.nature.com! Kuffer & Marzilli engineered conditionally stable MS2 & PP7 coat proteins (dMCP & dPCP) that degrade unless bound to RNA, enabling ultra–low-background, single-mRNA imaging in live cells. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧬 www.addgene.org/John_Ngo/

SCHEPHERD--the bioelectric cell herding platform built for YOU. Single cells, monolayers, organoids--this herds them all + new tricks. Plz try it-- we will *give* you parts! Teaser here of a steering a single cell. GS Yubin Lin's lifeblood with J. Yodh on piano; Celeste R. and Paul K. Thread 1/N

Out in @science.org! We found that the intestine doesn’t just push out cells when crowded. Instead, cells are in a mechanical tug-of-war, and weaker ones are extruded. A new view of how our gut keeps its balance and stays healthy. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very excited to be co-organizing this meeting next February. Fellow collective behavior enthusiasts, this one is for you!

Latest paper elifesciences.org/articles/107... closes an important cycle in our efforts to study regeneration: week-long recordings allow us to observe the behaviour of cells during the entire course of regeneration in a crustacean leg – bright objects in movie are fluorescent nuclei of cells. 1/6

🤩Wow huge opportunity alert!

And for your Friday afternoon, some in vivo ERK and RTK biosensor eye candy :)

NIH will only accept six applications per PI per calendar year. drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/07/17/n...

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

Two new preprints from the @arjunraj.bsky.social‬ on #gastruloids. Both excellent. Exploring the relationship between macroscopic reproducibility v microscopic heterogeneity. Stunning experiments and much to think about biorxiv.org/content/earl... biorxiv.org/content/earl...

Beautiful work on the development of protein kinase reporters. Congrats all! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We built pYtags to detect RTK activity in Drosophila embryos and used them to learn about how developmental patterns form bsky.app/profile/emko...

Excited to share that our work building in vivo biosensors for receptor tyrosine kinases (pYtags!) is now out www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Nature research paper: Spatiotemporal orchestration of mitosis by cyclin-dependent kinase https://go.nature.com/444lRhe

Synthetic biology could enable new types of programmable therapeutics. Our new preprint introduces synthetic protein circuits that selectively trigger cell death in Ras-mutant cancer cells, with interesting advantages compared to existing approaches. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is incredible.

This is a beautiful paper first authored by a (brilliant) Princeton undergrad!

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

“Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/o...

I talked to Nature about the latest development at NSF, which is a five-alarm fire for American science. The scale of immediate impact is massive. We narrowly escaped this affecting @viralemergence.org for now, but will have to shut down in a few months if this stays. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I'd like to share a little bit of happy lab news in these chaotic times: a new preprint, driven by the brilliant Qinhao Cao! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We address a big challenge in synbio: If you give me a protein "X", how can I give you a version of X whose activity is controlled by a kinase?

Our field has lost an amazing scientist, mentor, and old friend. Benny, along with Mike Hoffman, had a brilliant idea in the early 1980s. The first oncogenes were being cloned and they realized if we wanted to understand their roles in cancer, we needed to understand their normal function 1/n 🧪

Unbelievable. Richard Youle, winner of the Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, just got fired from the NIH. If you want to know what madness looks like, here it is, my friend.

People/organizations with means and a vision for the future of biomedical science - we need an “Arc Institute” equivalent in the DMV area to sponge up all the incredible talent, opportunity of a lifetime for a visionary entrepreneur, I will help! @mcuban.bsky.social

I'm so happy to report that our preprint on light-induced collective cell migration has now been published in Cell Systems! This project was a lot of fun and will be the basis for a lot of our ongoing & future work.

I always come home from conferences with swag for the kids and it’s usually a hit. This one was met by a 5-minute giggle fit and two “No, thank you”s. 😅😂

Interaction between two cells is necessary and sufficient to initiate PCP sorting😀, as shown by Lena P. Basta, Bradley W. Joyce, Dr. Eszter Posfai @eposfai.bsky.social , and Dr. Danelle Devenport. Here is the article. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Study Section meetings actually announced in the Federal Register today! www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Here is the peer-reviewed version of our study showing how some TAD borders are essential for gene regulation and development. Loss of a single CTCF motif is sufficient to cause embryonic lethality. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I'm thrilled that our paper is now online: www.nature.com/articles/s41... describing an elegant pH-triggered CIE. Thanks to everyone who made it an exciting and successful project @ewanmacdonald.bsky.social @cessvala.bsky.social @christianwunder.bsky.social #fluorescencefriday #microscopymonday

On January 6th, 1995, my (now ex) wife and I boarded a flight from Heathrow to JFK on a one way ticket. We had two suitcases and about $900 in cash - this was everything we owned and we were moving to the US. We thought it was maybe for 2-3 years. I had visited the US once, for a conference, and

For those who aren't biologists: This is a biosafety cabinet. Every biomedical research lab in the country has one or more of these bio safety cabinets. They use air flow to protect cells from contamination by bacteria and fungal spores while you are working with them.

Making intrabodies from antibodies just got easier! Learn how we made 𝟭𝟵 intrabodies to bind and light up peptides and histone modifications in live cells. And thanks to Academia, all sequences are freely available. (video credit: Yuko Sato @YukoSatoT2) (1/15) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cool paper using LLM to discover a protein sequence code for subcellular localization 👏 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Announcing this upcoming conference: GASTRULATION RELOADED: Developing, engineering, and evolving the body plan Join us as we explore the latest research on gastrulation and axis formation/elongation, featuring common, exotic, and synthetic embryos! 📅 14–17 October 2025 📍 Paris, France

A matter of threshold - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super excited to finally share PANCS-Binders: our group's decade-long quest to accelerate protein binder discovery. TLDR: PANCS-binders is fast (2 days), cheap (pennies), has extremely high fidelity (low false positive and negatives), and high-throughput. 1/n

Read below for the latest from Emily Ho in my lab on in vivo receptor tyrosine kinase biosensors. This has been a *dream* project, seeing endogenous RTK activity in live embryos for the first time. Surprise: they don't always match those of downstream signaling pathways!

Have you ever wanted to *see* receptor activity in embryos? If so, our new preprint is for you! In it, we showcase a new live-cell biosensor for visualizing receptor tyrosine kinase activity in living embryos – pYtags! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT🚨: In a paper out now in @science.org we describe a way to build synthetic phosphorylation circuits with customizable sense-and-response functions in human cells. Check it out at science.org/doi/10.1126/....

We just posted a preprint about a death mechanism that we find truly surprising. When you turn off transcription, cells die (duh!)... but did you know this happens due to loss of Pol II itself, not loss of Pol II activity!?! preprint here and a thread (1/n): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧪

1. I feel like this is such obvious advice that it gets taken for granted & consequently no one says this to young scientists but READ PAPERS, read all the papers. As you move up in your career you will have less & less time to do this. Read everything that appeals to you not just in your field

How insects unfold their wings ! rdcu.be/d28vT