It’s finally outtttt!!! Great to see this huge collab out, wouldn’t have been possible without any of the authors but especially my co-first @drsalamander.bsky.social and our mentors www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New insight on gonad morphogenesis ! Our new paper reveals how germ & somatic cells interact through TGF-Beta feedback loop to drive gonad morphogenesis in Hydractinia. Check out the full paper in Science Advances ! tinyurl.com/245rw699

Gonads and germ cells have an interdependent relationship in the cnidarian #Hydractinia. Germ cells secrete a TGF-beta ligand (called Gonadless) to induce and maintain the somatic gonad; gonads activate Tfap2 in pluripotent stem cells (i-cells) to commit them to germ fate tinyurl.com/245rw699

#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