New paper from our lab @jxbotany.bsky.social about auxin and cytokinin interactions during carpel initiation in Arabidopsis Led by @andreagomezfe.bsky.social in collaboration with @defolter-lab.bsky.social academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-...

🌱 2x David Sainsbury Career Development Fellowships at @slcuplants.bsky.social Launch your first independent research group in quantitative plant development, with generous support & world-class facilities. Deadline extended to 30 Jan 2026 www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/david-s... #plantscijobs 1/4🧵

Latest from our lab in 2025. A wonderful collaboration with Sabrina Sabatini's team at Sapienza University of Rome. How mechanical signals contribute to root growth and zonation @cbgpmadrid.bsky.social @upm.es doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Check out our latest preprint on the cellular mechanical basis of Voronoi tessellations in epithelia! This biophysics study is inspired by disordered tessellations observed in zebrafish hearts 🤓🐟💙 #SulaimaanLim #ChiuFanLeeLab arxiv.org/html/2512.13...

A left-handed banana! I've been looking for one for years.

🌱 2x David Sainsbury Career Development Fellowships at @slcuplants.bsky.social Unique opportunity for early-career researchers to launch their own independent research programme in quantitative plant development, with generous support & world-class facilities. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/david-s...

Active matter physics studies living beings as open, out of equilibrium, and emergent systems. In this perspective on plant morphogenesis, we show how such features arise from the basic hydromechanics of plant tissue and how to capture them in models. 🌱💧 Preprint 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2512.05554

New preprint! Do you like ocean waves? We found similar waves on bacterial colonies! We found that this collective behavior, known as rippling, is nothing but surface waves on an active nematic. @princeton.edu @mpipks.bsky.social @ub.edu @icreacommunity.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint! SOSEKI polarity proteins are mechanoresponsive integrators linking growth and tissue mechanics during lateral root formation. Their polarity marks growth boundaries and reorganises in response to mechanical alterations —reshaping how we think about axis formation. tinyurl.com/28p7af2w

Thrilled to have contributed to this @nature.com study on ethylene and cell wall mechanics in root compaction responses!! — Featuring Jiao Zhang, Lucas Peralta Ogorek, @borgesaugust.bsky.social , Bipin Pandey, Staffan Persson, Wanqi Zhang, Malcolm Bennett & more!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Beautiful!

How fast do plants actually grow? And which growth processes matter most for organ size? We dived into 176 papers, extracted and re-analyzed the data so you don’t have to! nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @newphyt.bsky.social @virajalim.bsky.social @elvisbranchini.bsky.social

A multiscale growth atlas of Arabidopsis: linking cell dynamics to organ development Alimchandani et al. @virajalim.bsky.social @elvisbranchini.bsky.social nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New paper!💡 Amir Ohad developed this nifty setup to measure weak forces generated by freely moving plants, based on the deflection of a pendulum (straw from the cafeteria 😎), which does not require any tethering of the plant: academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-... Plant-obstacle interactions here we come!

Boutillon, A., Banavar, S. P., & Campàs, O. (2024). Conserved physical mechanisms of cell and tissue elongation. Development (Cambridge, England), 151(10), dev202687. #EpithelialMechanicsReview https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.202687

Tissue-wide cues are sensed at the cellular level to coordinate microtubule orientations in plants https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.18.683221v1

Harmonic fields and the mechanical response of a cellular monolayer to ablation arxiv.org/abs/2510.05193

One day in the lab, we accidentally discovered that the spines of a cactus 🌵 straighten when exposed to fog. I was intrigued and so were my collaborators. How does this work and what can be gained from it? Here are some of the answers in our new preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🌿💻 Plant Models and Morphology 💻🌿 The 9th International Plant Computational Biology Workshop @slcuplants.bsky.social brought together mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and biologists exploring plant development through models and simulations. Huge thanks to organisers and speakers!👏

The BM^2 Lab is hiring a Ph.D. student to work on a variety of problems connected to modeling of morphogenesis in plants (i.e. ovule curvature formation, fixed handedness establishment in certain plant organs and its link to cell wall mechanics). Please share!

The self-replicating cellular organization of shoot apical #meristems New #AJB research by Étienne Couturier, @paulallanos.bsky.social, Antoine Lizée, Sébastien Besson & Jacques Dumais bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #botany #plantscience #bryophytes #lycophytes #ferns

🔎 DARWIN REVIEW 🔎 Mody et al. review the study of the cellular basis of plant morphogenesis with 3D digital organs 🔬🌱 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/... #PlantScience 🧪 @kschneitz.bsky.social

New preprint! "Understanding Shape and Residual Stress Dynamics in Rod-Like Plant Organs" 🌱 with @merozlab.bsky.social and @routierlab.bsky.social 👉 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Here it is! Epidermal cells in the root can figure out if they are covered by the root cap or not using mechanical signals! Thanks to @ckirchhelle.bsky.social, @moritznowack.bsky.social, @nathan-german.bsky.social Annamaria Kiss and all the others!

Kelly Aspinwall, Tyler Hain, M. Lisa Manning: Rigidity and mechanical response in biological structures https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18432 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18432 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.18432

Take a look at part of my work with @mc-caillaud.bsky.social at @rdplab.bsky.social about the role of actin cytoskeleton to maintain cytokinesis against cellular geometry 🌱🔬

Thrilled to share the first story from my postdoc! 🎉 A wonderful experiment + simulations collaboration. In the Drosophila wing, we find that 3D cell shapes affect signalling range and fine-tune developmental patterning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread below ⬇️

🍀🔬 CSLD5-mediated cell wall remodelling regulates tissue mechanics and shoot meristem growth @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... Movies: Cell division orientation in wild-type (attached) and csld5 (comment) shoot apical meristem.

Submitted and out as preprint: A Plausible Model of Phyllotaxis Patterning from a Single Apical Cell. 🪴🌱 Including 3D cell analysis & modeling #MorphoGraphX #MorphoDynamX #Physcomitrella #Phyllotaxis @roederlab.bsky.social @richardsmithlab.bsky.social dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Dreaming of a swimming pool? Bacteria are surrounded by water! Water capillary forces organize bacterial colonies into gas, nematic streams, or droplet states. New paper @natphys.nature.com led by Matt Black and Chenyi Fei, with Ned Wingreen and Josh Shaevitz! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One of the key aspects influencing morphogenesis is mechanics. We mapped the mechanical properties of living roots at the tissue and cellular levels using Brillouin microscopy and molecular rotors. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📢 Final hours to register for the Plant Computational Biology Workshop 2025! 📢 Don’t miss your chance to take part in talks and hands-on sessions with other plant modelling enthusiasts🪴 Deadline tomorrow (31 July) - www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/computationa... #ComputationalBiology #PlantSci

Our new paper is out! 1/14 How does an organ rebuild its shape after injury? It's not just about making new cells, but aligning them in the right direction — like bricks shaping a structure. We show that it's all driven by Cell Geometry! www.cell.com/current-biol...

🚨Don’t miss out! Last weeks left to register for the Plant Computational Biology Workshop 2025, sponsored by @cambup-lifesci.cambridge.org 🌱 📆Deadline 31 July - www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/computationa... #ComputationalBiology #PlantSci

Come and work with us! We are hiring a research assistant/associate @slcuplants.bsky.social to work on the RESYDE project (www2.hu-berlin.de/resyde/) using ML for multi-scale data and modelling to understand and engineer flower development! Details: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/52116/

New work with Saunders & Charras labs Physical boundaries guide cell fate decisions during human trunk development Reaction Diffusion model shows how geometry shapes biology with TBXT expression forming consistent domains regardless of colony size & shape www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our recent review on the origin of mechanical stresses in plants, in collaboration with Agata Burian: doi.org/10.1016/j.pb...

Krishna, S., Gopinath, A., & Bhattacharjee, S. M. (2022). Ordering and topological defects in social wasps' nests. Scientific reports, 12(1), 12901. #EpithelialMechanics www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Highly recommended! 🪴

🚨 Calling all plant modelling enthusiasts! Plant Computational Biology Workshop Open to researchers at all levels Workshop is free. Participants cover own travel, food & accommodation 📅 8-12 Sept | 💻 Talks, tools & hand-on sessions 🔗 www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/computationa... #ComputationalBiology #PlantSci

Mechanical interactions between plants and surroundings plays a huge role in understanding how plants negotiate their environment - but measuring low forces of free plants is hard! In this preprint Amir Ohad presents a new sensor - using a drinking straw! www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

The concern over antisemitism allegedly motivating the federal defunding of science at Harvard "is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions,” writes the Harvard professor Steven Pinker.

🙌We are thrilled to announce that our latest paper has been published in eLife : doi.org/10.7554/eLif... 💻Discover how MorphoNet can help you segment, curate, analyze and augment your 3D / 3D + t datasets without having to do a line of code, and much more ! 🦠

Buckling normally happens when you compress something slender, but 'tug' on a piece of crumpled paper at two points and it also buckles. Read more about how this "localized-TUG folding" occurs in many systems at: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2423439122

New preprint! Non-reciprocal interactions don’t arise from a potential. Yet, we found a way to encode them in a Hamiltonian, which captures the phase transitions of non-reciprocal systems! With Yubo Shi, Roderich Moessner, and @marinbukov.bsky.social @mpipks.bsky.social. arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05246

🚨Our paper is out! If you ever wonder how four-way junctions are avoided during plant cell division, some answers here 🧬🍀🔬🧪🤓 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Big thanks to Daniel Cosgrove & Enrico Coen @innerworldsjic.bsky.social for spotlighting our paper. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... Let’s call for more in vivo data on growth, elasticity & stress. Time to fuel the field with experiments! 🔬🖥️📏🧪🌿 @currentbiology.bsky.social

The Camelot paper is now published. If you ever wanted to try biomechanics, Camelot is an inexpensive and easy way to get started. @matmajda.bsky.social t.co/x3l0lllNS2

🌾🔬 The "dancing" of CRW1 (COILING ROOT IN WATER 1) mutant is so amazing! Mechanosensing antagonizes ethylene signaling to promote root gravitropism in rice @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...