Please join us! sundaramlab.com/blog/aecm-cl...

The 2025-2026 #aECM club schedule is now posted on our website, where you can also find the link to sign up for access. I’m looking forward to lots of great talks and discussions! sundaramlab.com/blog/aecm-cl...

Will today's digital lab notebooks feel like this in 30 years?

New preprint! How are developmental cycles coordinated across cell types? It turns out that, like Geppetto's cuckoo clocks in the GIF below, individual cell types are each performing their own little crazy routine, but all in sync with each other.

Now published: doi.org/10.1002/cne.... Our fan letter to Ward et al., J. Comp. Neuro. 1975 -- the first EM reconstruction of the C. elegans nervous system -- is now out in the same journal 50 years later.

easily readable history of C. elegans drug screening - great resource pedantic point: "26 sensory neurons... are exposed to the environment through cuticular holes and readily take up hydrophobic molecules" 8x2 AM, 2x2 PH, 1x6 IL2 = 26, but AWB takes up FITC = 28 and I'd count AWA, AWC, IL1 = 38

More new science from the lab! Led by @nathancsharris.bsky.social (now at GA State) and PD Priya Dutta. We describe how experience tunes the ratios of functional receptors in a single sensory neuron via coordinating transcriptional and post-transcriptional mechanisms to drive response plasticity.

In this 1892 lecture, the poet A. E. Housman advocates for basic curiosity-driven discovery research: www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poe... I've copied some of my favorite parts below. 1/10

Snails with human-like eyes?! Published in @natcomms.nature.com, the @planaria1.bsky.social & @accorsi-alice.bsky.social Labs have established apple snails as a novel model for studying vision restoration. They have complex camera-type eyes & the ability to regrow them in 28 days: bit.ly/4mvaxkq

Chitin. It's what's for dinner.

trick question, dev bio is movies not static images. correct answer is this wild-type C. elegans embryo from Bob Goldstein @bob-goldstein-art.bsky.social youtu.be/vxeBWwr4310

My fabulous colleague (and ex-postdoc) @inechipurenko.bsky.social and I (mostly Inna!) wrote a review extolling the many virtues of C. elegans for the study of cilia biology. A really interactive and collaborative community of people working in this field too. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Great GRC, great chair. This was the first GRC that I ever attended (2001), getting to speak on yeast "fertilization". I remember the meeting vividly, including the chair (Harvey Florman) who was super welcoming. These early interactions had a big impression on me as a student!

Our recent study exploring the mechanisms behind hybrid incompatibility in Caenorhabditis Elegans nematodes is now available at @currentbiology.bsky.social! Many thanks to my collaborators at UCSD - @odlab.bsky.social @greenbeegreen.bsky.social and the Rifkin Lab! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Huge thanks to Cathy Savage-Dunn @cswormlab.bsky.social and Baris Tursun @baristursun.bsky.social for an amazing #worm25 !! I want to call out the OUTSTANDING meeting they created! Talks and posters were A+++. Most of all they brought us together in one of the most challenging times we've had.

Rachel Swope opens the ECM workshop saying it's a great time to study ECM! #worm25

And then after lunch, the trainee-organized ECM workshop Khaira, 1:15 PM - 2:45 PM Extracellular Matrix: A New Era of Tools and Discovery

#aECM at #worm25: Talk this morning (Cell Bio session) by Prioty Sarwar from my lab A role for the spectrin cytoskeleton in cuticle alae patterning 9:06 AM - 9:18 AM Program Number: 66

#aECM at #worm25 Development session: Rachel Swope described how sensory cilia that are embedded in cuticle deal with the molt cycle

Kicking off #Worm25 with the parasitic nematode workshop organized by the great Astra Bryant and Elissa Hallem!

The Oegema/Desai labs are heading to #Worm25! Mark your calendars and check out the talks/posters from our current lab members @greenbeegreen.bsky.social @nehavarshney.bsky.social @aleesaschlientz.bsky.social and Wanying Tian!

Tursun lab en route to Davis for #worm25 after a stop in San Francisco.

Is this OUR M. Maduro? #worm25

WormAtlas will have a booth at the Worm Meeting during the poster sessions. Please stop by to see what is new and to enter our t-shirt giveaway. We have some free pens as well! #worm25

Good early morning #worm25!!! The Lee lab is en route to California for grad students Tahreem & Marybeth's first-ever worm meeting 🪱🪱🪱 Are we completely awake? No! Are we super excited to see worm friends very soon? You betcha! 🥳

I am excited (as usual) about attending #Worm25. But I am also sad that so many friends and colleagues can't be there. Because you know....insane policies and war and such. Hoping the science will provide at least a temporary distraction from the unending chaos.

Just what you want the morning of #worm25 - get in the shower, low pressure, almost no hot water. Something's wrong. Go downstairs, hear loud rushing water. Both kids still asleep. Broken pipe? Flooded house? Cancel trip? Nope - just the cats learned to turn the bathtub hot water on full blast.

Starting my pilgrimage to #Worm25 ✈️

Attending #Worm25 in Davis? Go talk to Clover at Poster 271C in the Cell Biology section on Tuesday to learn more about this approach and get some practical tips straight from the expert!

This opens up (literally) a lot of possibilities! I thought the eggshell was needed as a mechanical constraint for morphogenesis. This image of a comma stage embryo happily letting it all hang out in the world with nothing around it is wild!

#Worm25 starts tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing all those who can make it!!

Talks polished, posters printed, #worm25 we're on our way!

Technically "won't," not "can't." Purely as a hypothetical, if one were to transfer the net worth of three people (Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg) into a $1,000B public trust for science, it would probably spin off at least $50B/year in interest forever, equal to the NIH budget.

Happy to announce our paper comparing embryonic gene expression between C. elegans and C. briggsae, work led by Christopher Large with Rupa Khanal and in collaboration with Junhyong Kim and Bob Waterston. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This will be on Friday next week. I will talk about our beta cell work and the joy of finding new things in volume EM data. #volumeEM

Now on everyone's favorite pre-print server, "Proximity Labeling of NIMA Kinase Complex Components in C. elegans". 4 years in the making, it's something of a morph between a methods paper and a research pub. Hopefully some will find it useful, perhaps for different reasons. Responses welcomed! 1/2

During my faculty job search, one Nobel laureate tried to get me to remove my pants during our interview to prove that I had free will. Another future laureate shouted at me in our interview, "I don't give a ** what you think, you won't get any grants, you won't get tenure, good luck finding a job."

In 1975 "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Space Oddity" were on the UK top 100, and Ward, Thomson, White, and Brenner published the first reconstruction of the C. elegans sensory anatomy. A short 50 years later, we reconstructed the same neurons and glia in the embryo: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

I took my son and his friend to @wgbh.org 's High School Quiz Show. It is super fun (and free)! It aired this week & you can see us for a nanosecond. As a bonus, the winning coach turned out to be the husband of a @senguptalab.bsky.social grad student whose defense I was on several years ago!

Thanks for the shout out @meera-sundaram.bsky.social ! This was such a fun project! 101 knock-ins and counting and they all had such cool and unique localization pattern and substructures!

Delighted to share this timely article in Boston magazine on our local C. elegans community and the effects of NIH freezes. "There might be no group more enthusiastic, self-aware, or life-affirming than the worm people." www.bostonmagazine.com/news/c-elega...

Write a horror story in ten words.

This tops everything. Is there a short history anywhere of why everyone chose their allele/strain designations?

👇👇👇 New preprint dropped! Where we dive deep into the factors that restrict pluripotent stem cells to make the RIGHT cell types in the RIGHT place in planarians. Many surprises in this very exciting story. @kuangtse.bsky.social

photo from lab tonight, courtesy of grad student Jung Hyun Yoo

the big question

watching squirrel tv

this is getting ridiculous (in a good way). first it's $15 plasmid sequencing, now it's $25 C. elegans genome sequencing. time to look through our freezer collection at all the mutants we never followed up...

you can't go wrong studying ZP domain proteins!

NLM support responded within 30 min! Known issue that will be addressed in future update.