How do migrating cell groups balance force and flexibility? Our new preprint shows that RhoGAP15B downregulates RhoA–Myosin activity to stabilise protrusions and enable efficient collective migration in vivo. Happy New Year! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

RhoGAP15B RNAi collapses leader protrusions, while RhoGAP15B OE stabilises and extends them, underscoring tight control protrusion dynamics.

Christmas has come early. Fantastic to see this beautiful study from Peter Rugg-Gunn's lab at The Babraham Institute published today. Congratulations to Matteo Mole, Sarah Elderkin, Irene Zorzan and all other authors! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Stacked lineup just dropped. I know where I'll be 👀

The 2026 Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting website is LIVE!!! Go see the incredible list of scientists who will be speaking at the meeting next summer! (...and check the site early next year for info on registration and abstract submission.) scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu

I don't always get pretty, isolated, AND transfected primary neurons in culture, but when I do I take advantage.... Rat hippocampal neuron overexpressing ThymosinB4-mScarlet and imaged for 16hr on a @zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social LSM880 with Airyscan. #FluorescenceFriday #Microscopy

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

To build the body plan of an animal, cells must adhere to one another via cell-cell junctions. We now know these assemble as punctate protein complexes containing thousands of proteins, but how this occurs remains mysterious. 1/n 🧪 www.molbiolcell.org/doi/full/10....

😍 What a beaut! 😍

another old one...a microtubule (MT) movie - EB3-GFP label of MT plus ends growing...thanks to Vlad Costache (if interested, black holes = yolk granules, Ascidian Phallusia embryo)

I like this movie, but a friend of mine likes to complain about the obvious stitching artifacts. I'll try harder next time, Michael. Vimentin (orange) and ER (blue) in an overnight acquisition.

Ovarian follicles🥚are influenced by biochemical signals and the physical mechanics of their surroundings. A study from Joe Chan's group (NUS) reveals that surface stiffness and internal compressive stress are key for follicle development. 📖Read more: https://go.nature.com/4ptpMvE

🚨 Link up with me at #Cellbio2025 ! 🚨 Excited to present the majority of my postdoc work in the Physical Cell Biology from Molecules to Organisms Minisymposium. Thanks to the organizers for putting together such an exciting session 🤩

Featuring @katecavanaugh.bsky.social @yusuke-mori.bsky.social @fengtongji.bsky.social @liamjrussell99.bsky.social Gavin Schlissel, June Ho Hwan, Yuxuan Rain Xiong, Rohit Joshi, and myself! Sun 10AM–12PM, Room 120 (The app is missing the first few talks, but I assure you talks start right at 10AM!)

If you're at #cellbio2025, @atmolines.bsky.social Hernan Garcia and I invite you to attend our Minisymposium “Physical Cell Biology from Molecules to Organisms” for incredible talks on epigenetic mechanical memory, viscoelasticity, cortical flows, morphogenesis, tissue wetting, size scaling, et al!

SAVE THE DATE! Stoked to organize the 2026 Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting with @rashmi-priya.bsky.social, @lowelab.bsky.social, and Shelbi Russell. Come learn about Biomedicine, Biomechanics, and the Biosphere, August 24-28, 2026. Registration dates, etc., coming soon! Please RT

I'm thrilled to be able to share this new paper from post-doc Camilla Teng @xsciteng.bsky.social and our collaborators in the Leslie-Clarkson lab @emorygenetics.bsky.social on mechanisms of tissue fusion and cleft lip url: rupress.org/jcb/article/...

🔬🍀 A timelapse movie (unpublished data) from the lab. In the movie, the nucleus is moving towards the base of the polarized root hair cell.

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?!