Why did consciousness evolve at all? A superb special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org brings together experts across disciplines to explore the functions of consciousness and why it emerged in some species but not others. @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Interesting work suggesting the need for different mechanisms on the establishment of patterning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... that echo some ‘old’ ideas along similar lines and also involving #Wnt www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... www.nature.com/articles/nrg...

In @elife.bsky.social: A high-resolution, easy-to-build light-sheet microscope for subcellular imaging doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Researchers at the Crick, @cam.ac.uk and Sanquin Research Amsterdam have made a key discovery about how the immune system can switch from ‘on’ to ‘off’ so quickly. The findings could offer potential new avenues for treating cancer or autoimmune conditions. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2026-01...

The Company of Biologists and the British Society for Developmental Biology: a model partnership As part of the #biologists100 anniversary, Saanjbati Adhikari and Raman Das review the relationship between @biologists.bsky.social and @bsdb.bsky.social doi.org/10.1242/dev....

Excited to share Alison's @alisonkickuth.bsky.social paper from the lab out in @nature.com this week! We uncovered how a mechanical ratchet mechanism drives cytokinesis in early #zebrafish embryos. Read more in this thread 🧵 and at www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩 @poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de

Interested in the biophysics of organoids? We just published a review in Dev Cell—take a look! dlvr.it/TPyTb8 #Organoids #Biophysics

It makes the many hours of Zoom calls and discussion all worth while. For a further extension of this strategy see: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Polyploid giant cancer cells (PGCC): short-term return to multicellularity https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41287033/ #EvoDevo

Some archaea—an ancient group of microorganisms—have an entirely novel genetic code, according to a new study in Science. The findings expand our understanding of how alternative genetic codes evolve and hint at new molecular tools for biotechnology applications. https://scim.ag/4omApQ7

A giant impact between proto-Earth and a planet called Theia produced the Moon. Hopp et al. use isotopic measurements of lunar samples and cosmochemical modelling to show that Theia formed in the inner Solar System, probably closer to the Sun than Earth. ☄️ #planetsci www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Advanced grad students + postdocs: apply for the 2026 #kitpqbio summer course, "Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals," at buff.ly/OXXMKEv. Apply by Feb. 1. Course directors Adrienne Roeder (Cornell) and Sebastian Streichan (UCSB)

Researchers have identified a signalling feedback loop that may have been vital to the evolution of insect wings and therefore flight. The signals, called morphogens, act like lighthouses in most developing tissues, guiding nearby cells towards their fate. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-11...

If you are interested in an interdisciplinary project connecting tissue mechanics, synthetic approaches and dev bio, this is the position for you! we are excited to get this colaboration started!!👇👇🤩🤓👇👇

Hi, I’m David Brückner @davidbrueckner.bsky.social. I’ll take you through how cells in a tissue can use information distributed by biochemical gradients to make decisions, and how we can measure such positional information. buff.ly/RFxVeHh

#DBfeature Fritz Müller’s "Für Darwin" (1864) bridged evolution and development, anticipating evo-devo and warning to the dangers of scientific dogma By Scott Gilbert and Beatrice Steinert tinyurl.com/3sccvcr5 #SpecialIssue on Research that transformed #DevBio

Active geometrodynamics predicts the emergence of cytokinesis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.07.683232v1

The United States was the leading destination for top scientists from all over the world. That is ending. Politicians ended it. It will cripple our future competitiveness. And it’s such a bitter tragedy. Almost no Americans, Conservative or Liberal, grasp what is now being stolen from them.

Despite higher cell numbers and longer lifespans, large animals don’t have a higher cancer rate: Peto’s paradox. Elephants carry extra copies of tumor suppressor genes, while whales rely on enhanced DNA repair mechanisms! It’s fascinating that nature found different solutions to the same problem

This article is a homecoming for me. As a PhD student, I focused on the growth-rate transcriptional regulation in yeast. Now, ~ 20 years later, we report protein regulation scaling with the growth rates of single cells in mammalian tissues. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🤔 Can tissue patterning & tumor heterogeneity emerge in a self-organized way? We show that self-organized mechanical stress & density gradients pattern tumors in vitro & in vivo, and this behavior is quantitatively predicted by a mechano-chemical active fluid model! Check out Carlos' thread ⬇️

Can pressure gradients persist over long timescales in animal cells? We induced intracellular pressure gradients and examined the resulting flows in single cells. We reveal surprisingly long lasting pressure gradients. More here: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Very proud of this extremely collaborative piece: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... Here, we show that divergence in visual systems - in response to differences in the light environment - leads to rapid divergence in sexually selected colour traits. Work brilliantly led by Madeleine Carruthers. 🐟👀🎨

📣Our project, “Mechanometabolic Control of Vertebrate Limb Elongation,” has been funded by Wellcome! Over the next 8 years, we’ll collaborate with @manningresearch.bsky.social and Nathalie Agar’s group to understand the mechanics of ECM-rich mesenchymal tissues! Funded positions available!🎉

The final version of our review on biological filaments is out in Philtrans A (w/@jcammann.bsky.social Hannah Laeverenz-Schlogelhofer & Marco Mazza) - we have 417 references! Enjoy :) doi.org/10.1098/rsta... (see also other articles in this special issue on biological fluid dynamics) #biophysics

@natalieadye.bsky.social @mbisg.bsky.social opened the session discussing the importance of 3D imaging to understand how tissues grow in the correct direction – Full 3D imaging of Drosophila wing disc revealed new dynamics, pouches and folds in the apical surface. #MBIMPG2025

Out now in Seminars in Cell & Dev Biol! doi.org/10.1016/j.se... With thanks to co-authors @callumbucklow.bsky.social and @bertaverd.bsky.social

Please re-post: Interested in chromatin and its evolution? Good news! There's still time to join us in beautiful Catalonia (9-12 Dec) to discuss eukaryotic, bacterial, archaeal, and viral chromatin and how it all hangs together meetings.embo.org/event/24-evo... Abstract deadline: 30 September

The papers have been improved by reviewers @amartinezarias.bsky.social, @thibautbrunet.bsky.social & Cassandra Extavour. Thibaut synthesized the work beautifully in the #News_and_Views. None of that can happen without The Editor: @endofthepier.bsky.social (11/12) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Super excited that our group will be supported by an ERC Starting Grant! In project "InfoFate" we will study how cells use information in dynamical, neighborhood & mechanical signals to make decisions. We'll have PhD and Postdoc positions available, please get in touch if interested!

Are you a biologist with a research interest in embryogenesis or synthetic biology? Join our upcoming residential scientific meeting in Brighton on 20-21 October on the topic of generative biology: royalsociety.org/science-even...

🧵Why do early embryonic cell cycles speed up with temperature almost like simple chemical reactions, but not quite? 🌡️ Across frogs, fish, worms, and flies we found a shared scaling law, and uncovered why deviations from Arrhenius behavior emerge. 👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62918-0

For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began go.nature.com/4lPmznS

Lee, L. W., Lee, G. H., Su, I. H., Lu, C. H., Lin, K. H., Wen, F. L., & Tang, M. J. (2025). Mechanobiological mechanism of cyclic stretch-induced cell columnarization. Cell reports, 44(5), 115662. #EpithelialMechanics buff.ly/j67xoTn

Spatiotemporal WNT and BMP gradients orchestrate regional enteroendocrine cell diversity along the Drosophila midgut https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.27.672561v1

We are excited to announce our new #partnership with the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) in Singapore! 🇸🇬 This collaboration will combine MBI’s expertise on molecular, cell, and tissue mechanobiology with our research on spatiotemporal organization of living matter to understand how organisms form 🔬

🤔 How do protrusion & polarity interactions govern the collision behavior of migrating cells? Check out our paper, just out in @prxlife.bsky.social 👉 journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst... Great work by Tom Brandstätter, in collab. w/ Chase Broedersz & Joachim Rädler @cens-lmu.bsky.social

📣 Now out in @physreve.bsky.social‬ as editors' suggestion: our theory on the role of different myosin II isoforms during cell migration. For standard parameters, A and B segregate to the front and the back, respectively. Yet for other parameter values, also oscillations are possible.

Our latest: We developed a chemo-optogenetic system for precise spatiotemporal control of morphogen production. Using dual light + small molecule control of Sonic Hedgehog production, we recapitulated neural tube patterning in vitro & measured spread of Shh 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A cell's internal spin direction results from myosin chirality – insight into how left-right symmetry is broken in certain tissues & organs 📷 Takaki Yamamoto et al @riken-bdr.bsky.social in @elife.bsky.social ➡️ bpod.org.uk/archive/2025... with Lux Fatimathas

🧬🔬🧪 🎉 Our team at @czbiohub is thrilled to share TWO companion papers out today in @NatureMethods! 📦 Ultrack — robust, scalable nD cell tracking 🌐 inTRACKtive — a beautiful, open-source web viewer for lineage exploration Let’s dive in! 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very happy to see it out, another fun collaboration with the Sixt group at @istaresearch.bsky.social ! See Mehmet's thread for a summary of how different immune cells can "surf" on each other's self-generated gradients to drive efficient co-migration!

Brand-new conference on collective behaviour! Join us to foster a community to study how interactions among the constituents trigger fascinating collective phenomena: biofilms, fish schools, tissue self-organisation, bird swarms & many more! Thanks to amazing speakers for helping us realise this!

Kin selection has sparked debate for decades. Now, a landmark study offers a generalised version of Hamilton’s rule, capturing the messy, nonlinear reality of evolution and cooperation. Explained in our latest Insight Article: buff.ly/EKfPBhH #EvoBio #Evolution

Our new paper is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Using 3D reconstructions and volume measurements in Drosophila wing primordia, we show that growth can be uncoupled from cell proliferation and uncover a new time window for growth arrest. With @leopoldlab.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

The goal of a PhD is not to learn some facts or read a few papers or learn a bunch of techniques. The goal of a PhD is to learn independence, problem solving, how to finish things you start, resilience, & gain the ability to adapt & think creatively. Learning these things is hard.

'Ice, Rock, and Beauty', by David Brodie, provides readers with a comprehensive survey of our cosmic neighborhood, the Solar System, and allows readers to appreciate our growing place in the wider environment, on Earth and beyond. bit.ly/4lswGip #BookSky #SolarSystem

Now out in ACS Infectious Diseases @pubs.acs.org: joint work from the Lanzer, Tanaka, Schwarz and Cavalcanti-Adam labs within #SFB1129 on the adhesion footprint of malaria-infected infected red blood cells. Read the open access paper here: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

3D epithelial cell topology tunes signalling range to promote precise patterning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.08.668674v1