New preprint from my Ph.D.: 'Mechanical organization yields degenerate dissipation beyond linear response' We asked how energy dissipation changes as an active actomyosin material is driven farther from equilibrium. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🎉 A huge milestone for Dresden and the wider biophysics community! 🔬The Center for the Organization of Living Matter (COLM) at TUD will become the new home of PoL, and starts construction in 2027. This new building will be purpose-built for novel and interdisciplinary collaborations!

Hearts have topological defects. By treating the mouse myocardium as a 3D nematic, we found disclination lines threading through it. In situs inversus hearts, twist must match structural chirality for contraction to work, as found by quantifying the nematic chirality. biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Topological defects and coherent myocardial chirality shape torsional heart contraction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.13.718243v1

My first, first author paper is now on #ScienceAdvances ! Linker histone H1 is a liquid-like "glue" condensing chromatin, which revises textbooks! 📖✨ science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… Huge thanks to @kazu-maeshima.bsky.social , for supervision. Amazing collab with @rcollepardo.bsky.social ’s group! 1/

New preprint from the lab! How do tissue shapes influence cell fate decisions? By manipulating brain organoid geometry, we show that lumen rounding directs apical progenitor division mode and promotes the emergence of basal progenitors. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

We are very excited for the next Zoom seminar of Metabolism in Development & Physiology! When: Thursday, 9th of April, 16:00 CET Speakers: ·    Xingbo Yang, Technische Universität Dresden ·    Yi Xuan Low, MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences Join the zoom meeting: ucl.zoom.us/j/9390124290...

It was great to interact with people from a broad field of condensed matter physics! Hope you enjoyed the AR experience into the spatiotemporal dynamics of living matter!

PoL is at the DPG @dpgphysik.bsky.social spring meeting in Dresden. Visit us in Tent C until Thursday afternoon! Special thanks to the @brugueslab.bsky.social for the cool data on our Apple Vision Pro devices! Come check it out 🤓🎉

Just in time for Friday, the next image from our annual PoL Photo Competition 📸 👨‍🔬 🔬©️ This #microscopy image was taken by Shuzo Kato, a PhD student in the Brugués lab @brugueslab.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de 🔍 Caption: The mitotic spindle in a zebrafish embryo under oxygen depletion (DCX-GFP).

Really excited to share our new paper in @nature.com! We uncovered how a physical instability of the cytoplasm coupled with the cell cycle drives cytoplasmic partitioning in early embryos #zebrafish #drosophila. Read more in this🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩 @poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de

Here's the next submission from our annual PoL Photo Competition 📸 👨‍🔬 🔬©️ This beautiful image was designed by Shuzo Kato, a PhD student in the Brugués lab @brugueslab.bsky.social 🔍 Caption: A mitotic spindle; acrylic on canvas.

Wetting-Mediated Remodeling of the Cytoskeletal Cortex by Phase-Separated Condensates in Cell-Free Reactions doi.org/10.1021/acs....

Published in Science Advances! Looking forward to discussing the implications of our results and their applications with many researchers. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Really happy and proud to share my PhD work! This has been a fun and collaborative project that led to the discovery of a unique biophysical mechanism of axial elongation in mouse gastruloids and human gastruloids, and confirmed our key findings in vivo with mouse embryos. Check it out down below!

New preprint from the lab! We discovered a transient fluidization in the basal region of human forebrains by tracking microdroplets in cerebral organoids.This “basal fluidization”, absent in gorilla and mouse, may contribute to greater surface expansion in human forebrains 1/ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Still can't believe this: WE WON THE IG NOBEL PHYSICS PRIZE www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

✨ That's a wrap on #EMBODevMet after four inspiring days of cutting-edge science, new ideas, and reconnections. 👏 A huge thanks to all participants, speakers, and organisers who made this event so special. We can't wait to welcome you back to another EMBL event 👉 embl.org/events

🚨Attention image analysts, with expertise in programming and image/data science software! We are #hiring another scientific role at PoL to support our interdisciplinary research team. Please share with your network! 👨‍🔬 🔬 🗓Deadline: September 19th Apply here: tud.link/vj1kv9 #imageanalysis #jobad

We are #hiring for two scientific support roles at PoL - in light microscopy and biophysics instrumentation. Please share with your network! 👨‍🔬 🔬 Are you an expert in either of these areas? We would love to hear from you! The deadline for both roles is September 18th. 🗓️ Apply here: tud.link/vj1kv9

Patrick's paper is finally out, a label-free method to measure the composition of multicomponent biomolecular condensates!

🧵1/5 Excited to share our new paper: "Active Liquid Crystal Theory Explains the Collective Organization of Microtubules in Human Mitotic Spindles". Joint work with Colm Kelleher (now at Syracuse, previously Harvard) @flatironinstitute.org arxiv.org/abs/2507.22273

We're thrilled to announce that our Excellence Cluster Physics of Life (PoL) has been renewed for a second funding phase (2026-2032) by @dfg.de ! Thanks to everyone who made this possible! 🎉👏 We'll continue our cutting-edge research towards understanding what brings matter to life! #biophysics #dfg

I am very happy to share that my work on active deformations of lipid vesicles is finally out in Nature Physics. A nicer thread+movies coming soon, in the meantime: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thx to Andreas, Hammad, Dmitry, Gerhard @laynefrechette.bsky.social and everybody else who contributed!

🎉Exciting announcement about our new exhibition!🎉 Curious about the world of biophysics? Our "Physics of Life" exhibition opens every Tues, Weds, and Thurs from 1-6pm. Entry is free! 📍Find us at Cosmo Wissenschaftsforum, at the Kulturpalast, Dresden until May 8th. #Biophysics #Dresden #Science

📢‼️ Exciting new preprint from the lab by @nikhil-mishra.bsky.social et al, now out on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social, reveals that the early embryo geometry spatiotemporally patterns zygotic genome activation (ZGA) in zebrafish. 🐟 tinyurl.com/Biorxiv-nmis... Read on to learn more... 👇

3️⃣"Physics of the Early Embryonic Divisions Workshop – Microtubules, energy and cell fate decisions in early embryogenesis" by @olgaafonso.bsky.social, @shuzokato.bsky.social & Helena Cantwell thenode.biologists.com/physics-of-t... Thank you to everyone who wrote these reports! (3/3🧵)

New paper alert! ‼️‼️ Super happy to share that my postdoc paper is finally out! 1/3 We looked at scaling of chromosome separation during anaphase in zebrafish embryos.

Happy to share link to pdf/video of lecture at College de France on « Encoding, decoding & representations of space». I present how length scales are defined in biology, Shannon information theory, positional information & patterning in guided + self-organised systems. Enjoy! tinyurl.com/y85ft5nj

And our new preprint! "Gene-scale in vitro reconstitution reveals histone acetylation directly controls chromatin architecture", biorxiv (2024). Led by Yohsuke T Fukai, in collaboration with Kurumizaka lab (U Tokyo) and Umehara lab (RIKEN BDR). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I was very lucky to be there. Thank you so much for organizing such a wonderful workshop!

hello world