We built a targeted protein degradation–based system to mimic reproductive age-related aneuploidy in young eggs - revealing how chromosome errors associated with female infertility arise with age. 🧬✨ With @jiyeonleem.bsky.social and our team at Yale MCDB. Read: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

📣 New preprint! Stoked to share a fantastic collaboration with @campaslab.bsky.social! We discover a unique mammalian mechanism for body axis elongation using mouse and human gastruloids, and confirm central findings in mouse embryos. Check out the 🧵 👇 @mpi-cbg.de @poldresden.bsky.social

Thrilled to announce the launch of my lab @cri-utsw.bsky.social at UTSW this January! We will explore how cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, focusing on membrane mechanics to reveal how tension and signaling work together to shape cell behavior.

I’m thrilled to share my postdoc work and the first paper from the McKinley Lab! 🎉 @karalmckinley.bsky.social We built the first transgenic model of menstruation in mice. We used it to uncover how the endometrium organizes and sheds during menstruation. 🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

Happy Fluorescence Friday with this new preprint 👀

New job, new preprint! We found that embryo implantation can be understood as active wetting! Embryos from older mothers have trouble implanting because they are too contractile and viscous. Check out the wonderful thread (and movies!) by @katecavanaugh.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Amazingly, yes! Here, we indexed embryos, calculated compaction metrics, and selected Normal and Accelerated tempo’d embryos for later implantation assays. We find compaction metrics correlate with ultimate implantation potential – for both aged and young maternal conditions.

Well, we also find increased contractility in the aged embryo also correlates with faster compaction at the 8-cell stage. Could this be a possible metric to see which ones will implant?

But contractility tunes cell-cell adhesion (limiting spreading) and cell-substrate adhesion (promoting spreading). Aged embryos show higher blastocyst surface tension AND higher spreading forces via Traction Force Microscopy. Weird… So how can we explain reduced spreading?

Using mouse embryos, we visualize implantation in vitro to see what’s wrong in embryo development w/ advanced maternal age. In vitro implantation assays show aged embryos do not implant as efficiently.

A mechanical origin for implantation defects in embryos from aged females https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679218v1

See this? This = implanting mouse embryo. Usually this happens inside its mother and is invisible to us, but we can actually watch implantation ex vivo with the hope of understanding why implantation goes awry in embryos of older women. A 🧵...

🚨 New Manuscript about to drop! 🚨 Stay tuned!

A cell finding its way through the matrix, imaged with @joycemeiri.bsky.social on LLS.

SCHEPHERD--the bioelectric cell herding platform built for YOU. Single cells, monolayers, organoids--this herds them all + new tricks. Plz try it-- we will *give* you parts! Teaser here of a steering a single cell. GS Yubin Lin's lifeblood with J. Yodh on piano; Celeste R. and Paul K. Thread 1/N

A ring of cells deforms into a triangular keyhole in just 15 minutes. Meet the hindgut, a model for boundary-driven morphogenesis! Out now in @pnas.org at doi.org/10.1073/pnas... with @zhaoshh.bsky.social, Alex Jacinto, Eric Wieschaus, Stas Shvartsman, @lepuslapis.bsky.social (1/8)

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:

Looks like I am late to this party but have exciting news. I’ve been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to study #XtrmCells! Thankful to @erc.europa.eus for this opportunity, and to my collaborators, mentors, and group for their support. Looking forward to exploring the mechanics of these cells!

(1/n) The zebrafish notochord slowly builds the vertebral column of the spine over ~ 2 weeks through a process of molecular segmentation (=division of tissue into units)

Automated optogenetic control of hundreds of cells in parallel. Each cell is individually steered, collectively acting as a "tissue printer". Preprint & code out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

On cell extrusion in the #intestine! After 80 years of observations, we finally took a deeper look thanks to 2D #organoids. We report: 3D #forces, #extrusion still only in the villus even without curvature, #lamellipodia generate 3D force.. and more. Have a look! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This postdoc position is still open! Apply if you want to come work with us on asymmetric cell divisions in spiralian embryos! postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

It’s #FluorescenceFriday again! @maikbischoff.bsky.social encouraged me to post more beautiful images, so I hope you enjoy this image of Ajuba at Tricellular Junctions in #Drosophila 🪰 want to know more? Click here: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Have you ever thought about inflating tissues? Or maybe quickly deflating those inflated tissues? New #EpithelialMechanics pre-print: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🧵 with pressure control, multiscale buckling, controlled wrinkling

Our first paper submitted to the International Conference on Computer Vision @iccv.bsky.social has been accepted! 🎉 Huge congratulations to all co-authors — Sacha Ichbiah, Anshuman Sinha, and Fabrice Delbary — for their fantastic work. Stay tuned… we’ll share more about deltaMic in a few days!

De Belly, H., & Weiner, O. D. (2024). Follow the flow: Actin and membrane act as an integrated system to globally coordinate cell shape and movement. Current opinion in cell biology, 89, 102392. #EpithelialMechanicsReview buff.ly/K4Td3dH

Nucleoli as biomolecular bubble tea! Congrats to former Princeton ugrad Holly Cheng (now GS @MIT) ->Holly's senior thesis work, a close collab w Roggeveen Wang & @zs-biophys.bsky.social‬ &Stone. Come for the cool movies & stay for the viscoelasticity! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407423122

Job Alert! We are recruiting one postdoc to work on spiralian embryos and their crazy polar lobes. More info about this HFSP-funded position on our website baronelab.org: scroll to the end, click on "this could be you"...start your adventure!

Excited about the new work from Z. Dunajova & S. Tasciyan (with the Sixt lab @ISTA) - how the mechanical heterogeneity of the environment can be (by itself!) a driver of tumor cell dissemination! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Combination of in vitro exp, simulations and KPZ stat phys!👇🧵1/n

Just 20 days to go till the Cell Contact and Adhesion GRC--we have 166 folks registered and are finalizing the program--very excited to see old friends, meet new colleagues and hear and see great science!

I’m in the very best space of my life personally and with my science. And I watch everything around me crumbling. I often tell Jack: we have the best deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is so demoralizing. We are losing critical ECR funding from all sources..and in doing so, losing the future of science. Who will stand up for these vulnerable communities?!

Word on the street is that HHMI is ending its highly impactful Hanna Gray Fellows Program. If true, its another extremely disappointing capitulation by our leading biomedical philanthropy www.hhmi.org/programs/han...

Heartbroken to hear that the @hhmi.org Hanna Grey fellowship competition is being cancelled this year. I poured so much work and creativity into this app and am very grateful for everyone who helped me revise. It is such a difficult time to be a young scientist.

Deeply disappointed in HHMI today. Others and I worked hard to submit these applications and to have them be pulled months after their submission, super disheartening…

I am a proud HHMI Gilliam Fellow alumn. The HHMI funded me at a critical time in my career - a real inflection point that made me realize that I had a place and future in science. I always looked to the HHMI as a safety net to those historically excluded by academia, 1/4

Scientific progress cannot pause when the political climate gets tough. Institutions with the resources to lead should not either. I urge @hhmi.org to reconsider. Scientists at the edge of discovery are counting on you to show up, not scale back.

These programs have been lifelines for early career scientists, especially those from historically excluded backgrounds. Pausing them sends exactly the wrong message at a time when science needs bold investment.

Having a hard time processing this. HHMI is pausing all competitions. Very demoralizing for early career scientists like me @hhmi.org

Not sure how to feel - hiring freezes, wide grant terminations, killing off inspiring funding programs, institutions I thought were role models just.... giving in? ...Is anyone else stress eating?

Trichoplax adhaerens is one of the simplest and most enigmatic animals on earth. Its body shows incredible fluidity, changing shape within minutes. In a recent visit by Andrea Pasini we had the chance to host and observe these amazing animals live. [movie accelerated 3x; animal 0.5 to 1 mm in size]

If you're curious about how cells make decisions in complex environments, and how mathematical models can capture such behaviour, our preprint is now live! Check it out here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This time-lapse captures 17 hours of axonal growth from a chicken dorsal root ganglion explant, visualized through the actin cytoskeleton using live confocal imaging. I just submitted this video to the Nikon Small World in Motion competition. Today is the last day to upload yours! 😉 🧪

#CellMigration 𝐢𝐧 𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐨! Excited to share this video on #FluorescenceFriday 🌈 Today as a GIF to circumvent video compression 😅! Migratory Nascent Myotubes on #Drosophila Testes. Marker: Lifeact-eGFP. Scope: 980 Airyscan (@zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social) #cellbio #sciart #devbio #science #microscopy

In developing embryos, cells move a lot! Plenty of that movement is random. Is random cell mixing a feature or bug for tissue patterning? Turns out, it’s both! Excited to share the 1st preprint from my postdoc w/ Sean Megason @seanemcgeary.bsky.social and Allon Klein. 1/20 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Our PhD student Louis Romette is optimizing long-term live-cell imaging. He just casually dropped this 65-hour movie of a growing neuron (div 3 to 6) with knocked-in actin 🔥🕶️ #realtimemicroscopy

I'm so pleased the final version of this research is published! We found that epithelial cells neighoring the cytokinetic furrow regulate the speed and sucess of cell division, while maintaining barrier function and cell packing geometry. Many thanks to the co-authors who contributed! 🐸 #xenopus

We are excited to share our recent preprint on how tissue spreading guides extracellular matrix changes during early morphogenesis @gurdoninstitute.bsky.social

It's 60 days will the GRC. We have 167 applications and only 33 slots let--we'd love to see you there RT