Human fallibility now feels refreshing. What a weird time to live in.

New insights into #fertilization from the @pauligroup.bsky.social & Ikawa labs! In a tour-de-force study, we discovered ✨ SPARK ✨, a conserved sperm fertilization complex that couples sperm-egg binding to membrane fusion. Read on 🧵👇 and check out our preprint for more details! tinyurl.com/34cm4xat

Your and my life started with a sperm fusing to an egg. But how does this works on the molecular basis? Read the fascinating work by our colleagues @vdeneke.bsky.social @pauligroup.bsky.social who have identified the multi-protein complex SPARK ✨ that mediates recognition and membrane fusion 👇👇👇

Very happy to share our new paper. Together with our wonderful collaborators, we found that L-2-HG, a metabolite often viewed as “toxic,” also has an essential physiological function in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

💥 🚀 New preprint! 🎉🥳 How do hundreds of organelles organize themselves into near-perfect patterns inside a cell, without a blueprint? We dive deep into how basal bodies (BBs) self-organize in MCCs - and how actin actively tunes their dynamics into order 🍪 🧵👇 (1/17)

We are hiring! Join the Grade lab as a postdoctoral researcher to explore a development-inspired approach to cortical repair. Link below.👇

New preprint! We show that cell fate can be predicted from a snapshot of combinatorial signaling — and the underlying map is a single angle in signaling space. Work by first authors Bassit Fijabi and Seth Teague and collaboration with @davidbrueckner.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧬 New research from the Burga lab! We took a closer look at a rogue selfish protein and caught evolution in the act of turning something old into something radically new 💡 (a.k.a. neofunctionalization) @imbavienna.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Curious? Here’s a breakdown:

This looks amazing!!

PL retweet. Developmental Biology Course (Quintay). More information: biodesarrollo.unab.cl

I have also realized I have never posted the posters I make for everyone I invite for a talk (1/n) 🧪

I'm looking forward to this upcoming "Wild Thinking" workshop, organized by @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy and colleagues! www.cos.uni-heidelberg.de/en/wild-thin...

Interesting work by @nveits.bsky.social on the effect of NAD+/redox state on developmental speed in the Drosophila eye. I also enjoyed the discussion on the distinct effects of NAD+ levels and cellular redox state (NADH/NAD+ ratio). #metabolism #devbio #drosophila

Really happy to share my PhD story about the regulation of developmental speed in the Drosophila eye 🪰😃👀, which is now published @embojournal.org: link.springer.com/article/10.1... Grateful to everyone who make this possible, particularly F. Schweisguth @pasteur.fr @devstempasteur.bsky.social

Excited to be part of the first cohort of Preprint Editors at @dev-journal.bsky.social @biologists.bsky.social I will discuss selected preprints in stem cell biology, embryogenesis, signaling & genome integrity. Contact me if you come across an interesting preprint that you wish to highlight!

I am excited to be part of this team of Preprint Editors! Preprints have been essential in my career and so many others, accelerating science and changing the publishing ecosystem. I'm excited to contribute to making the most of them.

Cambridge → Boston → Cambridge again: I’m thrilled to return to Cambridge(UK) to open my lab at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge!🥳 (mzhulab.com) We study how dev timing shapes and being shaped by plasticity, evolution & ageing. 🚩Hiring at all levels: pls email me if interested!📩

(1/15) Thrilled to share new Evo-Devo work where we address the molecular, cellular & morphometric basis of an extreme axis segmentation program in the Japanese eel — an animal that forms 120 vertebrae.

John Gurdon (1933-2025) by Jim Smith journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

How metabolism intertwines with embryo development, and unexpectedly reveals glutamine (not glucose!) as the predominant carbon source for histone acetylation! Very happy to share our latest work, now out at: @cp-cellstemcell.bsky.social

What are the next steps toward understanding how metabolism shapes physiology? In our new Perspective, we explore this through a study from the Schirmeier Lab (doi.org/10.1113/JP28...). The authors show how neuronal PPP regulates redox balance by combining Drosophila genetics and metabolic sensor.

scRNA-seq has partly ruined murmurations for me...

Today we remember #RitaLeviMontalcini, born on April 22, 1909. #NobelPrize in Medicine (1986), her work transformed how we understand diseases like dementia, wound healing, and cancer. 🎥 Video credit: The Nobel Prize

The Landoni Lab opens this summer at UNIL! @fbm-unil.bsky.social 🔬 Quantitative #imaging + systems biology to decipher how #metabolic architecture & #mtDNA dynamically shape tissue development, #aging and #mitodisease. Beyond excited to fire up the lasers, open positions soon! 🧪 #mitochondria #newPI

I illustrated my way through the @bsdb.bsky.social Spring Meeting a couple weeks ago - here's my illustrated summary of the conference! I sketched (almost) all the speakers and glimpses of the science that made it such a great few days.

Excited to share our joint efforts on the ratioCitron biosensor platform! 🔬✨ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Norito Tamura @mpiage.bsky.social from my lab enabled ratiometric citrate measurements in flow cytometry for population-scale, single-cell analysis.

I am giving a "Crash Course in Embryo Development" for the general public (no science background needed! pitched around GCSE-level) in London on 21st May www.crick.ac.uk/whats-on/cri... We'll dip into development, with a splash of embryo models, and a pinch of ethics. And it's free! Book online 👍

Thrilled to present our comparative study on the evolution of zygotic genome activation (ZGA)!! 🥚🧬 Amazing PhD work of @campobes.bsky.social together with @fedemantica.bsky.social and many collaborators! @melisupf.bsky.social @crg.eu. Thread below 1/15 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Now published. Congrats to Soham and all co-authors! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... @embl.org

Excited to announce Physics of Living Matter 19! To be held in Cambridge 24-25th September 2026: www.plm-symposium.org

Just published in @science.org 🚀 By controlling how cells align, we show that living nematic tissues can be programmed to generate forces and fold into predictable 3D shapes. A new platform for tissue engineering and the design of smart active materials! 🫆 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Congratulations to the @dev-journal.bsky.social 2025 Outstanding Paper nominations, & special mention to the winner by Yang et al doi.org/10.1242/dev.... For the top three nominations and an interview with the winners see: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

How can we learn tissue mechanics directly from cell patterns and images? In our new preprint, we introduce VertAX, a differentiable vertex-model framework in JAX for simulating epithelia, inferring parameters, and designing target tissue behaviors. shorturl.at/PUzT0 1/5

Hi all! 👋 leeboratory.bsky.social and I are recruiting a VIP³ postdoc to join our teams and decode the genetic logic of how blastoids transit to the post-implantation stage. MolBio, genetics and computational approaches. If this sounds like you (or someone you know), we’d love to hear from you! 🚀

Happy #fluorescencefriday (and start of vacation!) to all those who are celebrating Lifeact-labeled epidermal stem cells closing a wound after in vivo adult zebrafish skin injury

🚨 Why can’t mammals regenerate limbs like frog tadpoles or salamanders? In our new paper in @science.org , we show that species-specific oxygen sensing acts as a gatekeeper for initiating limb regeneration 🐭🐸 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #EvoDevo

New preprint from the lab! How do tissue shapes influence cell fate decisions? By manipulating brain organoid geometry, we show that lumen rounding directs apical progenitor division mode and promotes the emergence of basal progenitors. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/

🥳 I am happy to share our latest manuscript published in @natcellbio.nature.com We use #Gastruloids to study #CellCompetition during early mammalian development and find not only that this is highly pronounced in our system but also tightly restricted in time. (1/12) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are very excited for the next Zoom seminar of Metabolism in Development & Physiology! When: Thursday, 9th of April, 16:00 CET Speakers: ·    Xingbo Yang, Technische Universität Dresden ·    Yi Xuan Low, MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences Join the zoom meeting: ucl.zoom.us/j/9390124290...

👇👇👇 If are you excited about helping us recruit and train the next generation of scientists, don't hesitate to apply! The @viennabiocenter.bsky.social is a great place to work. 🙂

The @vbcscitraining.bsky.social is looking a PhD Program Manager! Needless to say this is an incredible important position. So please apply if you want to help us find, recruit and train the next generation of scientists! RT appreciated!

I am extremely excited that my first first-author paper from my PhD is finally out 😆!! We developed a new CLEM workflow to measure lipid densities at the nanoscale. So if you are into lipids and super-resolution imaging approaches, this one is for you: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🎉 Very happy, stoked & honored to have been awarded an @hfspo.bsky.social Research Program Grant for a dream project conceived w/ Eric Glowacki @ceitec.eu & @bernasozen.bsky.social 🥳 Thanks @hfspo.bsky.social for funding bold ideas & projects that aim to push across boundaries 🙏 #stuffthatmatters

Happy to share the heroic effort of @gaellel.bsky.social to reduce our segmentation pain through EpiCure (Epithelial Curation), a napari plugin easing the curation of epithelial segmentation developed with several groups of @devstempasteur.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... See more 👇

Delighted to introduce KELPE: mESCs with two insulated genomic landing pads, which we use to generate new synNotch and PUFFFIN neighbour-labelling lines. They were named after kelpies, creatures from Scottish folklore, and they look pretty on a kelpie micropattern! #DevBio #SynBio

Very happy to announce that I will be joining the Faculty of Biology & @cibss.bsky.social at @uni-freiburg.de as an Emmy-Noether funded group leader. We will tackle the molecular and genetic basis of developmental timing and size control using diverse Oryzias species. We are hiring at all levels !

The Frenster Lab is here! 🍾 I am so excited to start my #EmmyNoether funded group at @uni-freiburg.de this summer. Our group studies #CellCompetition dynamics during embryonic development using #gastruloids from multiple species. Thanks to the @dfg.de for creating this opportunity! FrensterLab.com

Honoured and overwhelmed to receive the 2026 Waddington Medal. Science is a team effort, and I've been fortunate to work alongside exceptional people asking hard questions. Thank you to the BSDB and to everyone who has been part of the journey. bsdb.org/2026/03/24/2...

Join us this Friday in the Euro-BioImaging #VirtualPub!🔬

We’re looking for a new team member! 🚀 Only 3 more weeks to apply to the fantastic Vienna BioCenter PhD program