Is Friday the 13th REALLY unlucky if it’s #FluoresenceFriday, and you get trained on an Elyra? I think not???

Really excited to be in Cambridge over the next two months working on a super fun project with @dgershlick.bsky.social and his team at the CIMR, and to get to immerse myself in some super duper cool membrane trafficking research 🤓 A huge thank you to @embo.org for supporting this exchange ! 🥹🫶

last live cell microscopy session for a while today

maaaannnn the cell lines I’ve been working on for months decided to die on me over the weekend after I passaged them, just before i was due to sort them 🥺😭 If you have any bad jokes, or anecdotes of disaster from your final year of your phd (that you learned/recovered from) pls send them my way 🥲

UCD has elected a new pope!

Icey morning at @ucddublin.bsky.social today 🦢❄️

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell (1984)

Grateful for the opportunities to learn when experiments go wrong and when cells misbehave, but my god - with 6 months left in the lab before submitting I could do with less things going wrong at this point

Dublin contigent touching down in London for this year’s UK Membrane Trafficking ( #UKMT2025 ?) meeting! Come chat to me about the Golgi at poster 04 tomorrow 😋 (a 4am start is never great but when the Heathrow air traffic means you’re circling over London in the sunrise, it doesn’t feel too bad 🥹)

A glittery, festive #FluorescenceFriday today, spent playing with some fun samples 🪩🕺

Image analysis at sunrise yesterday morning 🥹

Me leaving the lab after seeing bands the right size in my colony PCR gel

Managed to get two mammoth and problematic experiments working on the same day… and it’s a Sunday… suspicious… (everybody pray for colonies on my plates tomorrow)

Send help, I think I have met the cloning final boss of my PhD

Happy halloween 🎃 This year’s pumpkin design is based on what occupies my thoughts and haunts me every minute of every day at the moment

statistically significant p values in a dataset that has taken two and a half years to produce

I jinxed myself SOOOOOO BADDDD with this This week’s practical on our trusty confocal was rudely interrupted by a detector failure that took 1hr of the 2hr session to identify & resolve Then as soon as it’s up & working again the gas detector in the room goes off :) three :) different :) times :)

One of these days I swear I am just going to come into the lab in my pyjamas

Feeling really reflective after 9 hours of microscopy practicals this week.. it is such a wonderful privilege to be able to show students fluorescence microscopy for the first time, there is nothing that can beat the feeling of joy at hearing all the “wow!”s when you first switch on the lasers 🥹

🧠 The Lipid #Brain Atlas is out now! If you think #lipids are boring and membranes are all the same, prepare to be surprised. Led by @lucafusarbassini.bsky.social with Giovanni D'Angelo's lab, we mapped membrane lipids in the mouse brain at high resolution. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Attention membrane traffickers! I'm recruiting a post-doc to my lab in Dundee. We're dissecting the functions of intrinsically disordered domains of COPII coat proteins. We think they control timing of coat assembly and morphology of carriers. www.dundee.ac.uk/work-for-us/...

After many years of hm-ing and haw-ing about why some of the fusion proteins I’ve cloned showed cytoplasmic background I’ve finally found the culprit

Spending my weekend churning out data from live cell time series for a poster I have left very, very last minute; but at least the backdrop is pretty 🥹💞

Late night live cell sesh, captured by @madeleenbrink.bsky.social 🫶 (featuring hair tied back by the chopped off end of a latex glove, life hack for all long hair havers who find themselves short of a hair tie in the lab)

How does a cell just fit that much stuff inside of it . Like there is SO MUCH jammed into something SO small .

Just finished imaging my last rep of an experiment that has taken a grand total of 6100 minutes (101.66 hrs) of live-cell confocal imaging, spread across 305x 35mm dishes

Went outside to go look at the stars and all I can see are Starlink satellites . :(

If you have an exciting microscopy-based membrane biology discovery to showcase this may be for you! Submit your abstracts and/or get in touch! Please repost

A brief moment of solitude and reflection beneath the trees today :) After 7 years in UCD between my undergrad and the PhD, today I finished my last ever accredited module. Feeling so grateful for the opportunity to have learnt so much about myself and the world, and excited for the future :)

Taking a shot here, a colleague is seeking a #postdoc position in/near #Germany. She’s eager to expand into #organoids , & has experience in #Spheroids, #BiologicalImaging, #CellBiology #HighContentMicroscopy Any leads, connections, or suggestions would be hugely appreciated! #Microscopy

Excited to share our new @pubs.acs.org paper! We engineered cells with ~10% photolipids in the ER membrane. This enabled optical control of membrane viscosity to study its impact on ER→Golgi protein transport. @dirktrauner.bsky.social @noemijimenezrojo.bsky.social pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Just out of curiosity… who here also maintains an active LinkedIn profile?

Our protocol for gene editing is online and all plasmids are on @addgene.bsky.social! CRISPR away everybody and get in touch if you need anything 🤩

Going through a lot of flip flopping between psyching and hyping myself up to really knuckle tf down for final year, and then just staring at my to-do list and calendar like this

Personally I think that scientists should invent a pair of goggles that lets you see every single molecular interaction in a single cell at once

Microscopy most especially. To be the first human to ever lay eyes on something. What a feeling.

I set out to review the evolution of eukaryotic intracellular traffic, but along the way a new hypothesis came into focus: maybe the earliest membrane carriers were tubules, not coated vesicles! New preprint: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... Here’s the idea. 🧵

This was a fun paper to be involved in. Carlos identified many known and unknown proteins associated with endosomal membrane domains with really amazing proximity proteomics. @carlosantonplagaro.bsky.social @peterjcullen1.bsky.social

Very excited to announce that my first, first author paper, is now on BioRxiv! In this paper we unambiguously show #COPII coated vesicles in unperturbed human cells for the very first time!! Make my day and check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #Cryo-ET #TeamTomo #Cryo-CLEM ❄️🔬❄️🔬❄️🔬❄️🔬

Multi-scale Molecular Imaging of Human Cells reveals COPI and COPII Vesicles at ER Exit Sites https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.29.667472v1

The Confocal Room

Found outside the confocal room this morning… perhaps the most ironic book that could have been dropped outside the microscope bunker 😂

Too pretty to wait until #FluorescenceFriday 😊 Golgi in green nestled amongst the microtubules in magenta :)

Giddy over this morning’s live cell experiment … hook this feeling to my veins

Hello microscopists!! Help needed - does anybody know of any good Mn2+ indicators that are good in live cell microscopy assays ? Never worked with them before and not sure if there are any reliable & affordable ones out there..? Reposts appreciated 🙏🙏

🧪 Does anybody have any examples on how to teach critical thinking in a structured way to young people? Very fearful that AI has rlly impacted the natural ways that a lot of us acquired critical thinking skills over time, & as AI isn’t going anywhere I’m keen to understand other ways to teach it.

Me and my army of freshly poured plates ready for more cloning

TEM Golgi for @lucygdornan.bsky.social imaged @pasteur.fr #cryoEM #Golgi #MembraneTrafficking #IwontstaycalmitstheGolgi

Excited to share my first review paper with the amazing #JCSLab! "Harnessing 3D cell models & high-res imaging to unveil nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery" is now published Read here 👉 www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.... #nanoparticles #drugdelivery #Frontiers #imaging #UCD #UCDSBES