Spring in Barcelona is 2 weeks between shivering and sweating 🌸

Stellar work on stella 🖤

Our new paper is out: "The 3D architecture of the ctenophore aboral organ & the evolution of complex integrative centers in animals. We reveal a remarkable cell type diversity, nerve net condensation, a multilayered circuit & gene expression profiles. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #ctenophores

Excited to share our new work on the 3D architecture of the ctenophore aboral organ! We explored its remarkable cellular diversity and integration with the syncytial nerve net, uncovering connectivity and insights into the evolution of sensory complexes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Suddenly ran into a sketch I’ve made for the placozoan peptidergic cells paper: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

How do brain circuits evolve? We started looking for some answers by using synapse-resolution cross-species comparative connectomics on an entire olfactory circuit 👇 bit.ly/44aVm9E

For the last 3 years, my personal world has been in flames - the loss of home, the loved ones, friends and the other things we often take for granted. Roscoff feels like a personal refugium - a timeless place where one’s soul can hide & think about things that really matter.

Despite all that is going on, we are still all working on our science. Our 2nd collaboration with @jisaacmurray.bsky.social‬ and Bob Waterston (UW) is out: Lineage-resolved analysis of embryonic gene expression evolution in C. elegans and C. briggsae | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

this photo is published without a permission 🐙 @ruthstyfhals.bsky.social

🐙 🖤 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@embopress.org 🙂

Czechoslovak legionnaires posing next to their train. 2025, colorized #tcteac

The Weedstock of Biology 🫡

All aboard! Going to the woods #tcteac

A while ago I got this pure meme material of an autograph

Now you can also read all about @idoiaeu.bsky.social beautiful work on catshark brain development and the enigmatic origin of cajal retzius cells in their preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

These negative synergies create a sensor of TF ratios. If one TF’s expression dominates, you get activation. If both are there, repression. A perfect design to ensure that target genes are expressed specifically at the right place. (9/n)

Excited we played a small part in this amazing work out now in @nature.com. We established a ctenophore culture from a single individual through self-fertilization to reduce heterozygosity levels. Named them "Arnau" & they lived happily for 2 years 😂 @joanjsoto.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

I’m very excited to share our work on the early evolution of animal regulatory genome architecture - the main project of my postdoc, carried out across two wonderful and inspirational labs of @arnausebe.bsky.social and @mamartirenom.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Paper out !!🥳big thanks to all authors @marliesoomen.bsky.social @diego-rt.bsky.social @kaessmannlab.bsky.social @jonathangoeke.bsky.social @lorenzamottes.bsky.social & 'bluesky-less' Lots of interesting new TE (& genes) biology Data fully browsable💻 👉 embryo.helmholtz-munich.de/shiny_embryo/

Our atlas of BMP signaling activity in adult Nematostella is finally out! Fantastic, meticulous work and beautiful illustrations by @paulknabl.bsky.social Thanks, @fwf-at.bsky.social for funding our work! bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

manuscript got rejected after 8 months of waiting for a review in Genome Biology. exactly the same happened to another person I know. people manage to get babies in this timeframe.

Congrats to the @jbuenrostro.bsky.social lab on this recent paper. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Unfortunately, it makes several misleading claims that we disagree with. We will address these technical & other issues with this work over the next few months.

Yerba mate makes the third-most popular caffeinated drink in the world, but it’s unrelated to tea and coffee. The first reconstruction of its genome is helping us understand how multiple species have evolved to synthesise caffeine. https://buff.ly/4jnWk82

Just look at this cover 😍

Our ctenophores say hi to Bluesky 👋🏼

What did the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (#LECA) look like? Consensus View in #PLOSBiology; massive authorship including @AncestralState, @lauraeme.bsky.social, John Archbald, @andrewjroger.bsky.social, @dackslabecb.bsky.social, Jeremy Wideman. plos.io/4g0alq4

We have two open PhD positions in my group at @crg.eu. We are seeking candidates with a background in computational and/or molecular biology, and with a broad interest in evolutionary biology, gene regulation, and comparative genomics. 📅Apply before January 12 here: www.crg.eu/en/content/t...

this is golden

(1/8) 🚀 Excited to share our findings on a large-scale ChIP-seq assay for 166 previously uncharacterized human transcription factors (TFs) and their roles in both regulatory regions, and more strikingly, the “dark matter” genome. 🌌 doi.org/10.1101/2024....

Incredible resource for DNA binding protein specificity from the Codebook consortium. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Am reading these in detail & will have a lot to say. Stay tuned for thoughts.

SOX and POU are crucial Transcription Factors in animal development, believed to be innovations of this group. Here we find them in unicellular relatives of animals. And hold tight, you can use a choanoflagellate 🦠 SOX gene to make a full chimeric 🐁 ! Read more here 🧵: rdcu.be/d0dPN 1/6