Dear Friends, I just published an insightful review on neural crest evolutionary origin and later transformations. “Co-option and innovation in neural crest evolution”: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Where Igor Ademeyko @adameykolab.bsky.social walks us through a beautiful scenario of what the hell neural crest cells are, co-option, and the camouflage hypothesis. With special mention of Rohon-Beard neurons! 🧪🐟

Here is our recent story:

Rhopilema esculentum, commonly known as the flame jellyfish or Bizen kurage, is a species of edible jellyfish native to the warm temperate waters of the Pacific Ocean. Aquarium of Paris. ✨🌊

Job Alert!🚨 Opening for a Postdoctoral Research Officer in Sensory Neuroscience at Swansea Uni. to work on an exciting project investigating the structure & function of the cupulae of the lateral line neuromasts in #zebrafish. More details to apply: www.swansea.ac.uk/jobs-at-swan... 🧪 #PostdocJobs

Glob-glob! Absolutely magical sea anemone larva (about 7 mm) from The Lombok Strait, Indonesia 🇮🇩

Tracing clonality, we find that PLSTC LSCs occupy a variety of stable, self-renewing states within the same well. So, this apparent continuum is actually made of thousands of clonal "constellations"!!!! Using @adameykolab.bsky.social super cool tool scLiTr, we can group these into 5 fate clusters.

Chaos in my dish: a hydrozoan jellyfish Leuckartiara octona tries to squeeze between bipinnaria larvae of Luidia sarsii starfish. The North Sea, Skagerrak ✨🌊🔬 These animals are about 7 mm in length - quite large as compared to what I typically show here.

The red-chested sea cucumber, Trachythyone insolens, from Cape Town, South Africa 🇿🇦. Holothurians (sea cucumbers) are primarily deposit or suspension feeders that use specialized, mucus-covered oral tentacles to trap food particles, such as organic detritus, from the seabed or water column.

Our review “A competition model of multilineage priming and cell-fate decisions” is out: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Here is the new meditative film about zooplankton and other cute animals from Okinawa. If you feel a need to calm down - just start watching it: youtu.be/JtwwoEzW3vU?...

Cute Australian zooplankton: youtu.be/ZbgelbqXmR0?...

Finally, I went to the forest not-so-nearby

We start with an invited talk Clonal Reconstruction at Single Cell Level Helps to Decipher Embryonic Development by Igor Adameyko @adameykolab.bsky.social, Karolinska Institute @ki.se & Medical University of Vienna @meduniwien.ac.at

Gonionemus vertens is a hydrozoan jellyfish with a beautiful medusa stage and tiny modest polyps. I collected and filmed a bunch of them in Skagerrak, North Sea. These are quite dangerous jellies - one sting can send a person into hospital. The full video is here: youtu.be/4ElkLwwWW4Q?...

Here is my new video about metamorphic larvae of starfish. They look super cool and weird: youtu.be/an2goKdP9_k?...

Stunning, Xenophora pallidula from Queensland via Sea Gems Australia #molluscmonday www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=...

I worked a bit longer on my pink nudibranch video collection resulting from my Okinawa trip (visiting colleagues at OIST). Now the full video is on youtube: youtu.be/-YF9AQxVYS0?...

A Cyerce kikutarobabai nudibranch from Okinawa. This one is very tiny - 3 mm long. I found it bouncing in the waves being torn from the reef by the water power. It was flying like a pink dot among the muddy water with debris. I did not expect much before I brought it under the microscope.

This is a really nice position with a great mentor. Highly recommended. Rush.

Here is our new review article: "The role of microheterogeneity in cell fate decisions in neural progenitors and neural crest" Check it out if you are curious about how cell cycle or transcriptional noise affect fate selection in cell lineages. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

If you want to run MERFISH spatial transcriptomics and you search for the optimized probe codebooks, here they are: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A pyrosome

Parley.tv made a story about my work on plankton biodiversity: parley.tv/journal/igor...

One of the best parts of Gordon Conferences in Italy.

Another video of our feeding experiment using fluorescent beads and bryozoan colonies (Membraniopora sp.). 💫

Mediterranean zooplankton from Pula.

This is what is currently missing: GFP fluorescence of the GFP-beta-catenin knock-in embryos showing maternal GFP-b-cat in the vegetal half of the embryo and the onset of gastrulation at the animal pole.

Tanya's @tclebedeva.bsky.social paper on endomesoderm specification in the beta-catenin-negative area of the Nematostella embryo is out! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Flowering season in Vienna

Feeding bryozoans. The experiment with fluorescent beads. Helgoland, North Sea 🌊

Diversity of zooplankton.

Another try to post a video: starfish larva, 1 mm long. This is a brachiolaria stage.

This is true, but also - science or any other human activity doesn't need to be USEFUL. It's immensely valuable to understand the world around us for it's own sake. Same goes for humanities, arts, pure mathematics. Without this the world is just an empty vessel for maximizing shareholder value.

With a part of the Adameyko lab

Swedish west coast

A beautiful planet

Nice memories from Patagonian w-track

Pretty amazing seed pods of Drooping star of Bethlehem (Ornithogallum nutans L.)

What is new in the neural crest domain? Which neural crest-related studies do you find fun and exciting? Let’s have an interesting discussion. I feel like I want to go back to look into the pigmentation patterns and evolution of multipotency.

When I have a writer’s block, this guy comes and helps.

Here is our Focus Issue at #NatureNeuroscience! I loved working on it! One of the many highlights was the highly collaborative spirit among the authors. A win for #openscience www.nature.com/neuro/volume...

Yep, this is about cell fate transitions in the nervous system.

These are really great reviews for those who plan single cell experiments in neuroscience.

(1) Hi, Bluesky! Don't miss Igor's thread about our recent preprint, it’s a very cool reading! Here I will try to go a bit deeper into the computational part of the study — our new method clone2vec, how we developed it, what it does, and what it doesn't do. Grab a drink, and let's go!

Beautiful study from the Kicheva lab BMP signalling self-organises neural crest induction & dorsal neural patterning via a temporal relay mechanism involving Lmx1a Also, useful stencil-based micropatterning technique for studying growing/migrating tissue formation www.cell.com/developmenta...

Our sweet cubozoan Tripedalia. Their rhopalia contain image-forming eyes and are bilaterally-symmetrical.

Let’s go!

We are interested in all aspects globally connecting the neural crest to evolution, biomedicine and specific sub-field of developmental biology. In this study we show the role of motor circuits in shaping neural crest-derived sympathetic nervous system: www.nature.com/articles/s41...