That's it: #GfE2026 #GfESEBDDSDB2026 is over. Thanks for the science, talks, posters, chairing, discussions, helpers in back & front. See you latest at #GfE2028 for more #DevBio & oidsks for all the fish, plants, mice, worm, flies, frogs, squids, brown algae, human, -oids, whatnots and you.

Honored and very grateful to receive the GfE PhD Award 2026! Many thanks to GfE for the recognition of our work! This would not have been possible without the guidance of my supervisor @genikhovich.bsky.social and the many amazing collaborators and colleagues who contributed along the way ❤️.#GfE2026

The GfE PhD Award 2026 goes to Tatiana Lebedeva (@tclebedeva.bsky.social) for her outstanding contribution to developmental biology. She presents the topic of her thesis on the "Role of β-Catenin signaling in germ layer specification in Cnidaria". #GfE2026

#gfe2026 @gfeev.bsky.social PhD Award goes to Tatiana Lebedeva 🎉 for Tatiana's thesis investigating the role of β-catenin in specifying germ layers in one of my favourite organisms, the starlet sea anemone, Nematostella.

Opinion piece: Can space be democratized? India’s frugal #space innovation offers key lessons for #EmergingNations. In PNAS Front Matter: https://ow.ly/QN1N50Yn1ps#space#EmergingNations#ISRO #India #Chandrayaan3 #SpaceProgram #NASA #MAVENOrbiter

New preprint from Ruohan Zhong on the architecture of the Nematostella nervous system, check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper out in @bmc.springernature.com 🤩👏 A routine 5-ethynyl uridine (EU) RNA labeling experiment in a sea anemone turned into detective work for @malinkjosavik.bsky.social, @ktgarschall.bsky.social & @prhsteinmetz.bsky.social 🕵️‍♀️

New Paper Alert! 1982: WNT discovered 1990s: NOTCH enters the stage 2000s: “Let’s study pathways separately.” 2025: “Actually, they talk to each other.” Welcome to the era of WNT-NOTCH crosstalk Great collaboration with Mašek lab (CZ) and G. Collu (US) royalsocietypublishing.org/rsob/article...

Thrilled to share the preprint from my PhD! 🥳 Where I characterised epithelial cell extrusion in a sea anemone 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Big thanks to my supervisor @prhsteinmetz.bsky.social and coauthors @noahbruderer.bsky.social @lionlchristiaen.bsky.social at🇳🇴 @msarscentre.bsky.social ⬇️🧵

A new Hydractinia single-cell atlas from the Schnitzler lab: >47K cells from feeding polyps and stolon tissue that refines major somatic cell lineages and recovers a novel population of putative immune cells – a valuable resource for the cnidarian research community and beyond! tinyurl.com/hsymSC

Congrats to Nadja and the @tessmarraiblelabs.bsky.social. Check out their cool new work (featuring a small sketch I made)!

Freshly out at @natcomms.nature.com ! Our @univie.ac.at @awi.de @viennabiocenter.bsky.social @ercgrantees.bsky.social research into neurogenic plasticity of adult worm brains, and similarities in stem cells supporting growth of camera-type eyes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... [1/7]

This is so cool :)

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT📣: I haven’t been this excited to be part of something new in 15 years… Thrilled to reveal the passion project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half!🙀🥳 (thread 👇)

🚨 My lab is hiring at all levels! Interested in animal origins & evolutionary cell biology? I'm recruiting a postdoc, PhD students & a research assistant to study the molecular evolution of cell adhesion using marine invertebrates + comparative genomics. 🔗: clarkelab.com/join/ Please repost!

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 🧵...

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...

Just came back from a great meeting in Tutzing on the biology of basal Metazoa. Excellent talks, fantastic posters and very kind and vital community. Thanks also to our keynote speaker, Cassandra Extavour. She was the highlight of the meeting. Thanks everyone for contributing.

We are excited to announce the first Western VGZT of Season 7! 🎉 🗓️ Thursday, October 2nd ⏰ 9:30 PDT / 12:30 EDT / 16:30 UTC / 17:30 BST / 18:30 CET Our speakers: 👉 Antonia Weberling (@a-weberling.bsky.social) 👉 Sanjay Narayanaswamy (@sanjay-n.bsky.social)

Happy to be presenting our story on Nematostella self-organization :) tune in if you like to hear what organizes the organizer in cnidarian gastruloids! www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Hydra body axis balance: a fight between two transcription factors This Research Highlight showcases the work from Jaroslav Ferenc, Marylène Bonvin, Panagiotis Papasaikas, Jacqueline Ferralli, Clara Nuninger and Charisios D. Tsiairis: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

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...

🚨 Happy to share my PhD work! We set out to find what organizes the organizer in Nematostella gastruloids. While we knew Wnt1/3+ cells confer axial polarity, we identify the role of Notch signaling as partner in crime in polarising these organizers. How does it do it? www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Finally, the excellent postdoc work of Emmanuel Haillot is out, where he dissected the integration of Wnt, MAPK and Notch signaling in defining mesoderm and endoderm identities in the diploblast Nematostella. Strikingly similar to sea urchins. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great opportunity! The Uni Vienna has launched a call (APART) for 4-funding for outstanding postdocs from a US institution. The host lab has to nominate by 1 August a candidate for further selection. Anyone interested in our work please contact me by email with CV/motivation letter. Hurry up!

Nematostella butt valve!

In which we discuss the homologies between amphibian and mammalian organizers from the perspective of #gastruloids with special relevance to recently described A and C gastruloids as containing Spemann/Mangold and Trunk/Tail organizers www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We review self-organisation of organizers through the lens of Cnidarians (primarily Hydra and Nematostella) and propose an integrative Mechanochemical view for the same. Happy to be part of the 100 year Mangold-Spemann special edition @cellsdev.bsky.social @ulrichtechnau.bsky.social

About 100 years the Mangold-Spemann organizer was published and this has been one of the most fruitful and inspiring concepts in Developmental Biology. But how can organizers self-organize? In this review we summarize the knowledge how cnidarians do that: doi.org/10.1016/j.cd...

Here our model of how LME animal migration ends. I am happy to see this work out! As for cell migration in vivo, the path of this journey hasn’t always been straightforward. It is the closing of a chapter, and I look forward to what the future will bring.

Happy to have presented our evolving story at #DevStem2025. Exciting stuff on the way :)

Kick-off of the late afternoon session at the #DevStem2025 meeting. Sanjay Narayanaswamy @sanjay-n.bsky.social from @ulrichtechnau.bsky.social lab discusses germ layer biology in #Nematostella, exploring a powerful gastruloid system. For a primer on gastruloids, see doi.org/10.1016/j.cd...

We’re looking for PhD students to join the lab! 🧫🧑‍🔬 Curious about how metabolic processes shape patterning and morphogenesis? Enthusiastic about stem cell models for human development? - Then apply through the VBC PhD program! training.vbc.ac.at/phd-program/ ‼️Deadline: April 15‼️

Unexpected role of β-catenin signaling in germ layer specification In this 'Show and tell' post, @genikhovich.bsky.social and @tclebedeva.bsky.social tell us about their video of a GFP-β-catenin knock-in Nematostella embryo from their latest paper: 🎥 thenode.biologists.com/unexpected-r...

Beautiful!

Arguably the most significant step forward in discovery dissemination.

We are excited to be launching the next phase of our Fast & Fair peer review initiative: offering high-quality peer review within 7 working days. #fastandfairpeerreview Read the Editorial by EiC Daniel Gorelick @danielgorelick.bsky.social at: bit.ly/4kYD1mL

How many cells do you need to establish PCP? The magic number is 3! Beautiful work by Lena Basta in Danelle Devenport's lab. Happy to have contributed. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Had an amazing time presenting some of our work with #Nematostella at the #gastruloids meeting in beautiful Barcelona. Lots of science and cool breeze!

Developmental biology research leads to fundamental discoveries for biomedical research. Apoptosis. Ellis & Hovitz, 1986. PMID: 3955651. Worm image by Tokiko Furuta (Arur Lab) @socdevbio.bsky.social 9/12

In preprints: the ins and outs of Cnidaria germ layers Lucas Leclère and Chiara Sinigaglia @chisinig.bsky.social (@cnidevo.bsky.social @biom-banyuls.bsky.social) discuss 3 recent #preprints about the mechanisms that govern germ layer formation in Nematostella vectensis: doi.org/10.1242/dev....

Ambitious students interested in our attractive joint Master program "Evolutionary Genomics and Systems Biology" at the University of Vienna and the VetMed Uni should apply: studieren.univie.ac.at/en/degree-pr... Deadline April 7! The Bachelor only needs to be completed by September. Spread the word

*hearing crickets*

1/3 Our paper about miRNA target complementarity in Cnidaria is finally published in @emboreports.bsky.social This work was led by the talented Yael Admoni with help from Arie and Rubi in collaboration with the labs of @thecocodium.bsky.social and Michal Rabani www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

#Hydractinia takes regeneration to the extreme¬in a new preprint, Curantz et al. show that dissociated, reaggregated cells can form a new individual. We also show how they do it and which cells types actually contribute to the new individual (tip: not many of them). tinyurl.com/mr2s9zyf

Many academics point to bioRxiv as “the one thing improving science publishing”. If so, the one thing you all can do is persuade colleagues to submit and make this a norm. 1/2

Is it just me or is @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social down somehow? It either cannot load papers or the ones that load have the right titles but abstracts and full text of other papers instead...

That was another nice find -thanks John. We love Metchnikoff too -especially for his substantial contribution to invertebrate embryology, including of course this !

Excited to share our latest findings, now published @NatureNeuro www.nature.com/articles/s41... We found unmyelinated axons exhibit pearls-on-a-string morphology's due to their membrane mechanical properties. Threads will follow!

Dear everyone, Sorry for everything.