Neurons in the mouse brain bypass synapses by communicating with one another via tiny nanotubes. https://scim.ag/4pOH6fL

1/3 🔥🚨 We have a new @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social #preprint from our lab! Itamar Kozlovski, an excellent PhD student, established CUT&TAG in #Nematostella. He used this technique to map the transcriptional activation mark H3K27ac in two stinging cell populations www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Incredible pictures by @alexandrejan.bsky.social, ctenophore whisperer in the @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social lab 😍 Happy belated ctenophore day! 🌈

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

Amazing work by @thibautbrunet.bsky.social and his lab! I can’t stress enough how significant a development this is for Choanoflagellate research and it has been revolutionary for our work!

Latest from ours: www.cell.com/cell-reports... This is two stories in one: a case study/cautionary tale on developing genetic tools in new organisms, and the first hint at a gene regulatory network for choanoflagellate multicellular development (which turn out to involve a Hippo/YAP/ECM loop!) A 🧵

Happy Ctenophore Day! These glowing ocean drifters look like jellyfish but aren’t! They’re comb jellies, shimmering creatures that light up the sea with rows of beating cilia 💙🌈 Which species can you identify? 👀 Most are raised in @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social lab #CtenophoreDay #CombJelly #Ctenophore

Happy Ctenophore day! Its a perfect day to celebrate such a small yet beautifully diverse phyla that comes in a wide array of shapes and colors. #Ctenophoreday

For CTENOPHORE DAY, a little survey: Which end of this fishing Pleurobrachia is the mouth on? Please just "vote" in the comments — no definitive answers. 🦑🧪🌊 P.S. this is one of my earliest #ctenophore photos, shot on film in a home-built kreisel. P.P.S. Legit data-gathering for a future paper.

HAPPY CTENOPHORE DAY (part II). A full bucket of ctenophores for Ctenophore day - time to shimmer🌈🌊✨ Please watch till end: Mnemiopsis & Pleurobrachia included. Alexandre @alexandrejan.bsky.social filmed and caught this ctenophore at the same time @msarscentre.bsky.social #ctenophores #GoPro

HAPPY CTENOPHORE DAY (part I). The fjords around Bergen are full with Mnemiopsis right now. Movie by the amazing @alexandrejan.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social #ctenophores #GoPro

Happy Ctenophore Day! 🐙🦑🧪

If you’re applying to your dream lab for an internship/PhD/postdoc, always send a second email 1-2 weeks after the first one if you don’t hear back. I promise we will be grateful rather than annoyed. My email inbox is a disaster and I’m quite junior - and very few of us have secretarial support

Here it is! Postdoctoral position to identify the progenitors sensory organs in the regenerating legs of Parhyale apply here: www.averof-lab.org/pages/tracman 1/3

Nanotubes everywhere between neurons! A bit skeptical about these "dendrite-dendrite nanotubes" from a phalloidin staining in culture, but let's read on… www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Seems that we have a new reporter strain (pic: @jujumathieu.bsky.social)

Now Hiring! Whitney Laboratory Assistant/Associate Professor in Marine Bioscience Apply & More Info - explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53... We seek a creative, collaborative scientist whose research harnesses or advances cutting-edge tools. Please help spread the word & reach out with any questions!

Breaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt

Comb jelly season has started in Bergen, Norway! 🌈🍂🧪

Meet the 2025 cohort of @dev-journal.bsky.social Pathway to Independence fellows Read about the scientific visions of eight dev bio post-docs entering the academic job market journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Out @natcomms.nature.com: our work on how the ❤️-supporting pericardium forms & acts in pediatric heart conditions.🎈🫀 Expanding our preprint & with our first HCR (thx to @thelovelylab.bsky.social!). Congrats all! #devbio #zebrafish #CHD @cupediatrics.bsky.social @cudevbio.bsky.social rdcu.be/eIJm5

Day 30 - Dream. The final day of #sciartseptember. My long-term dream has always been to create a series of illustrated guides that would help identify the various jellies and jellyfish of the would. Creating illustrations like the ones below to accurately ID species.

Another season has started as well. We now find many different ctenophores in Byfjorden, a fjord that runs into the city center of Bergen. Here the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi: it uses a row of cilia called comb plates to swim. When hit by light, they create shimmering rainbows along their bodies.

🌟 Thrilled to share that my lab’s first publication is now out in @natmetabolism.nature.com. Congrats to the team 🎉 🧠 We discovered that neurons use endogenous fatty acids as an energy fuel, challenging long-standing models of sugars being the exclusive energy source for neurons. 1/3

Beautiful aurora last night. Season has officially started 🤩. These were taken handheld with my phone, 3s exposure with no editing at around 22.30.

Fantastic presentation by @malinkjosavik.bsky.social at the Tutzing basal metazoan workshop 👏 She shared her work on starvation and metabolism in Nematostella, conducted in collaboration between the @prhsteinmetz.bsky.social lab and the Dept of Biomedicine @unibergen.bsky.social ✨

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

Happy to share the Biodiversity Cell Atlas white paper, out today in @nature.com. We look at the possibilities, challenges, and potential impacts of molecularly mapping cells across the tree of life. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Explaining sea squirt development to the public? Challenge accepted! Our team had a great time at the #forskningsdagene science fair over the weekend. We met visitors of all ages who shared our excitement for science, and went back to the lab inspired and energized 🤩✨

Beautiful #Ediacaran fossil light on the E surface at Mistaken Point 🤩

New Paper by Parry et al., reinterpreting the oldest diverse #jellyfish fauna as sessile polypoid dinomischids 🪼 These findings significantly expand the temporal and geographical range of dinomischids, elucidating their morphological and taphonomic variation. buff.ly/ERV7P3C #PaleoSky #Fossils

Modeling whole ascidian embryos for #forksningdagene 😉🧪🧬🔬#devbio

Day 19 - Depths. blood belly comb jelly (Ctenophora), helmet jellyfish (Cnidaria). Animals in the deep sea are some of the most beautiful, particularly the jellies with bodies like abstract portraits that move ethereally in the abyss. Here are two drawings of jellies you can find in the deep sea.

Beautiful day out @discoverygeoparknl.bsky.social admiring the tiny Fractofusus on the Johnson surface 😍

In another exciting development our new preprint is online: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... This is the work of my brilliant graduate student Katerina Kourkoulou in collaboration with Maggie Liu and Arnold Mathijssen. Here is a video of the subject of our study:

Congratulations @lionlchristiaen.bsky.social, @rnadoctor.bsky.social & team for a new publication in @plosbiology.org 👏🧪 Their work shows a conserved pathway for neuromuscular junction development between tunicates and vertebrates 🧠 Read the article below ⤵️

Huge congratulations to postdoc Guillaume Poncelet @guillaumeponcelet.bsky.social who was awarded a UiB Early Idea innovation grant 🤩🎉 Inspired by his work in the @lionlchristiaen.bsky.social lab, he will be developing a new product derived from naturally occurring compounds 🔬 Read more below ⤵️

Our new preprint is up! This is the main postdoc work of @wiesner-t.bsky.social focusing on exocytosis along the axon shaft and its regulation by the sub membrane actin-spectrin scaffold: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read the thread below for a summary of our findings 🧵1/11

Check out this exciting study led by Anh-Tuan Trinh from our lab, where we investigated how thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish pallium receive, represent, and integrate sensory information: 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Early-career researchers: want to run your own lab? 🌟Max Planck Research Groups offer 6+ years, up to €2.7M in funding, open-topic freedom, team support & tenure-track opportunities. Intrigued? 😃Apply by Oct 14, 2025! www.mpg.de/max-planck-r...

We knew that cnidarians have stunning regenerative capacities. But the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the self-organization of gastruloids of Nematostella surprised us. A story of cell sorting and Notch signaling. Please check out the work of Sanjay's PhD work: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Check the last preprint from @simonhenriet.bsky.social & colleagues‬. By studying appendicularians, they revealed the events that permitted non-canonical splicing in these organisms: . Duplication & divergence of U2AF splicing factors . Gain & loss of chemical modifications on the spliceosomal RNA

Our lab is 2.5 years into #ERC funding✨ Grateful for the support that enabled us to uncover the syncytial nerve net in a ctenophore - a discovery reshaping our understanding of nervous system evolution. Stay tuned for more exciting discoveries to come @erc.europa.eu www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DAE...

Less than a month away! 📣 Our lab is so excited to co-host the #EMBOWorkshop on the evolution of #multicellularity. Get ready to dive deep into the origins of multicellular life across all kingdoms. 🔬See you in Barcelona (or online) soon! @prbb.org @csic.es

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Story on our Asgard microtubule paper by Nikki Greenwood: www.quantamagazine.org/tiny-tubes-r... Thanks to all interviewees🎤

New short paper from our lab @currentbiology.bsky.social, in which we discover of a new mode of cell motility for choanoflagellates: flagellar gliding. www.cell.com/current-biol... - A 🧵

🧪Discovery of calcarins in @elife.bsky.social, a protein family in the sponge Sycon ciliatum, clarifies spicule formation and suggests parallel evolution of carbonate biomineralization in sponges & corals—key for animals as ecosystem engineers of reefs. @lmumuenchen.bsky.social #molpalmuc

More on the ancient foundation of animal development. Coyle & King illustrate how core regulatory modules were present in our pre-animal ancestors. The key was not invention, but recycling & new protein interactions. #CellBiology #multicellularity #protistsOnSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...