Marvellous send off for @amartinezarias.bsky.social ‘s lab, perfectly located in Gaudi’s La Pedrera. I took no pictures as I was too busy hugging old friends, but the organisers incl @dias-andre.bsky.social pulled off something rly special. Community in science is the real joy of the work we do! 💕

With the group that came together @upf.edu in #Barcelona, celebrating 5 years of exploring, dreaming and discovering. Grateful #NotInTheGenes #CellsRUs

With alumni and an ex head of Department of Genetics @cam.ac.uk @cahirokane.bsky.social

Very good to see so many old friends in #Barcelona. Grateful for the memories of much shared over the years.

But….#InNumbersWeTrust…most of the time

among the many excellent talks, the presentations by @nmoris.bsky.social & @denisduboule.bsky.social stood out for me

Having fun @amartinezarias.bsky.social party! 🙏🏻🎉💐 Great meeting #InHoxWeSortOfTrust

With old friends in #Barcelona

1/2 From Cambridge to Barcelona, five years that go very quickly with much to be grateful for

🔬 "La science n'est pas une affaire d'opinion personnelle !" Yasmine Belkaid, Directrice générale de l'Institut Pasteur, dénonce le démantèlement de la recherche US et réaffirme le rôle crucial de la science face aux défis sanitaires mondiaux. ↘️ www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats...

Beautiful story that combined mechanobiology, evolution, and the power of fly (opto)genetics to make sense of the cephalic furrow. It was a pleasure writing the News & Views. No doubt this is still just the beginning for the field of mechano-evo-devo! Hats off to all involved

YES! #NotInTheGenes #CellsRUs

Great to see this seminal work out

Great to see this seminal work out

Have been listening to some core gene determinists e.g R Dawkins and others and it surprises me how flexible they are w/logic. Three statements are particularly odd.🧵

‘Our Ancestors the Fish’, a course by Prof. @neilshubin.bsky.social, Univ of Chicago, invited Prof @college-de-france.fr. in Paris @psl-univ.bsky.social. Four conferences, free access, open to everyone, with Tiktaalik as a guest star. Friends, colleagues and fossils in Paris and around, please RT🥁

🎓 Applications for Institut Pasteur's PhD programs open Sept 1-Oct 20, 2025 for October 2026 entry. Apply to up to 4 projects across 6 programs: PPU, PPU-IMAGINE @institutimagine.bsky.social, [email protected], PPU-EID @upcite.bsky.social & more 🧬 Register now ✍️ www.pasteur.fr/en/education...

We are searching for an enthusiastic scientist to join our team and establish annual killifish as a model system for early developmental biology and biophysics! @embl.org @embldbunit.bsky.social Apply here: embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/EMBL/job/Hei... Please re-post 🙏

Walking around #Montsec, Lleida. Wonderful sight. One side the skirts of the #Pyrenees (where a rainbow appeared) on the other Lleida. Altitude, air, clouds, mountains, peace of mind, time to think.

Lovely piece on five model organisms for the origin of animal multicellularity and on the community who studies them. It was a pleasure to make a small contribution.

The variability of early mammalian embryos never ceases to amaze me. Beautiful work on the emergence of PGCs in the cow from @carlyguiltinan www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... But look at the embryo amidst the enormous trophectoderm! Could you find it w/o epiblast markers? #Amazing #Stunning #CellsRUs

Dear [email protected], dear [email protected], to learn more about the importance of #Drosophila and crucial role of @flybase.bsky.social, and how it gave rise to at least 9 Nobel laureates in Physiology and Medicine, please see this link: droso4schools.wordpress.com/why-fly/

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

Day two of #LISH25 starting with a deep dive into deep learning for microscopy with Martin Weigert. Talk starting with #WoodstockBio #TCTeAC style #walk-up song. 🎶

We are today kicking off the two-week @embo.org practical course on #Lightsheet # Microscopy at @mpi-cbg.de in #Dresden. This is the fifth iteration of the course. Hashtag #LISH2025 meetings.embo.org/event/25-lsm

Hi bsky! Do embryonic tissues have backup plans🔀? Gastruloids (model of body elongation) can build an axis through different cellular mechanisms when on adherent substrates instead of free floating. A case of developmental plasticity! w/ A. Delahaye & ‪@bensteventon.bsky.social‬ shorturl.at/v01DO

1/n Fun journey continues: Our new @cp-cellstemcell.bsky.social paper out on how the Inherent & Dormant Plasticity of Mouse Naive PSCs can be "Exaggerated" to Directly form ~E8.5 Transgene-Free (TF) Mouse SEMs & WITHOUT inducing 8-16-Morula-like "Embryo Founder Cells". www.cell.com/cell-stem-ce...

Yes it is. Very well worth a watch these days

What happens when you plate #gastruloids at different times on different subtstrates is that we learn about cells, pattern formation and gastrulation. Excellent experiments from G. Serrano and ‪@bensteventon.bsky.social‬ raising interesting questions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #CellsRUs

Our first #Hydra paper. @anaisbailles.bsky.social all the way, with crucial theory contributions from Carl Modes and @zechnerlab.bsky.social Hydra maintenance by Heino Andreas and HCR by Giulia Serafini. Teamwork. Many thanks to the generous Hydra research community.

Hablando con @adrian_science sobre ‘el dia 14. Como las células diseñan la vida’ y sus cuitas con los #genes shorturl.at/oZcyf en castellano. Mas en @EdicionesPaidos “Las arquitectas de la vida’ #NotInTheGenes #CellsRUs

I think people outside biology widely underestimate what we don’t know, and probably what we don’t know we don’t know as well.

🧬 Advances in Stem Cell Biology Pasteur Course "It reminded me why I decided to be a scientist." Marianna Paladini, 2025 participant Curious about the next session? 📍Institut Pasteur, Paris 📅June 22 – July 3, 2026 🗣️Course in English 📩Application deadline: April 5, 2026 👉 bit.ly/416K6ZU

Further evidence that the #gastruloid system models the natural embryo from this spatiotemporal map of mouse #gastrulation www.cell.com/cell-reports... important as it provides a context for the, some times surprising, findings that the model is providing.

Just heard @wcratcliff.bsky.social‬ on the origin of #multicellularity www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsvD... Great to hear that cells harnessing physics was a significant step & to have a proper discussion of the question not led by the ‘power’ of genes. Well worth a listen. #NotInTheGenes #CellsRus

Katia took the initiative to start a Xenopus project in the lab a few years ago —and now her work is highlighted by Development! Huge congrats, Katia!

Those in the know might recognize this board, as of yesterday seating w/ me at home after travelling from an office in #Cambridge to one in Barcelona. Yes, something's coming & while that collection of pictures brings back many memories, I am looking forward to the future.

Remarkable finding supporting the existence of the interactions between two independent modules, #morphogenetic and #genetic, in #embryonic development. Acceleration of anterior genetic program in opossum @sermenchero.bsky.social‬ www.cell.com/developmenta... short 🧵

𝐎𝐥𝐠𝐚 𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐝𝐞, head of the research group GReNeC-Neurobio, is the new director of the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS) at @upf.edu  👉Valverde will be the first female director of the department. With her there are currently 3 women leading PRBB institutions ℹ️https://tuit.cat/N3ms3

Whenever I go back to this excerpt from W Harvey’s “De Generatione Animalium” Translated from the latin by Martin Llewellyn (1653), I feel the beauty and the challenge of #DevelopmentalBiology

How can we identify novel regulators of germ layer differentiation and body patterning? I am happy to announce that my preprint using single-cell CRISPR screens in gastruloids to answer this question is now online! Thank you to the rest of the @sendoellab.bsky.social and all coauthors!

🔴 TODAY‼️📣 PRBB-CRG conference 📋 Synthetic circuits as therapeutics 🗣️ Michael Elowitz (@elowitzlab.bsky.social‬) - @caltech.edu  📆 July 25 - ⏰ 12:00 CET hosted by: Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo - @upf.edu    📍#PRBB Marie Curie room

….and more #gastruloid preprint with proof of how to use their robustness and scalabiliy in high throughput screens to learn about #posttranscriptional regulation of gene expression @ Sendoel and Lutolf labs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I agree that this is likely coming in some shape and form our way. We need to start devising strategies to address this issue. EU science, in my opinion, is more vulnerable because it relies more heavily on government funding.

Hearing about close colleagues in the USA now sizing down or even closing their research operations😖. A drama for these friends, a pilot experiment for us, here in 🇪🇺 And despite many demagogic announcements, there is little we can do to help, other than to express our solidarity🤝

This is such a cool paper and dataset from lab of @arjunraj.bsky.social. There are [ahem] a lot of spatial transcriptomics papers out there. Here's a [rare?] example of one from which we can truly learn some interesting things... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations @alicegros.bsky.social @jules-vanaret.bsky.social & @dunsingvalentin.bsky.social for this huge team effort! Gastruloids morphogenesis is so fascinating and now we can explore and travel through them in 3D & at cell resolution day and night 🤩

Excellent work indeed, but I feel in this context @adrianobolondi.bsky.social fantastic work should also be mentioned www.cell.com/developmenta...

Many thanks! And all credit to @vayyappan.bsky.social and Cat Triandafillou for their excellent work! Indeed, gastruloids are an amazing system for getting clear answers to these sorts of questions.

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...