Felt a little festive at the microscope this morning for #FluorescenceFriday 🎄 Here’s the nervous system of a juvenile sea star ⭐️ Green = acetylated tubulin, red = nuclei Happy holidays!

We're approaching "I'm thrilled to announce" season on the socials, with the academic job cycle progressing along. Yes, it can be rough out there - *and you are doing awesome* - whether you land that interview or not! 👍💯 Happy holidays, all ⭐🐟

This controversy is such a rollercoaster... Yet, I'm hopeful we will come to a resolution soon-ish. People are coming up with bold new approaches (linkage, integrative phylogenomics), and while it takes inevitable time to identify their own pitfalls and artifacts, this is what progress looks like.

From an accidental discovery of hidden biology to a new framework to understanding and diagnosing rare disease. Thrilled to share the most recent work from our lab and the amazing Jimmy Ly. wi.mit.edu/news/alterna...

We built a targeted protein degradation–based system to mimic reproductive age-related aneuploidy in young eggs - revealing how chromosome errors associated with female infertility arise with age. 🧬✨ With @jiyeonleem.bsky.social and our team at Yale MCDB. Read: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Come work with us!

New preprint! Graduate student Océane Marescal leverages quiescence - proliferative hibernation - to reveal unexpected dynamics for “constitutively”-localized centromere proteins. To understand the logic of cell division, you need to consider non-dividing cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I hope to take a PhD student in 2026 to study siphonophores. Please reach out if you are interested in applying this fall. For examples of recent lab projects see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... and academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

This postdoc position is still open! Apply if you want to come work with us on asymmetric cell divisions in spiralian embryos! postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

A little late with this one, but we got to go hunting for sea urchins on Gemma with the Semester in Biological Discovery (SBD) students. Thanks Captain David Bank and naturalist Scott Bennett, and Alex Megerle for the great writeup! 🌊🌊🌊 www.mbl.edu/news/close-u...

Love this article! Feeling pumped to share the awesomeness of echinoderms again very soon in Embryology 2025

We have shared detailed protocols for the expression, purification, and use of VitelloTag-Cas9 (in sea stars) on our website. We hope that this will be a useful starting place for working in your own favorite organism! www.theswartzlab.org/tools-and-pr...

At last! The plasmids from our VitelloTag paper ( journals.biologists.com/dev/article/... ) are now available on Addgene: www.addgene.org/browse/artic... We hope they might be useful for you to deliver Cas9 in your favorite organism. Stay tuned for detailed protocols on our lab website.

Another terrific Developmental Biology of the Sea Urchin & Other Marine Invertebrates is done! Thank you to all attendees for sharing your awesome science, the co-organizers for their hard work, our sponsors, and @mblscience.bsky.social for being such a great venue. Photo credit to Bob Morris 👏

Honored to have given the keynote lecture at the DBSUMI meeting. Such an exciting dev bio community! Thanks @zakswartz.bsky.social for the invitation and kind hospitality at wonderful @mblscience.bsky.social. The naturalist approach to science and rich history in this place are inspiring.

Also a blast from the past! Another preprint is now available from my first postdoc in the @arnonelab.bsky.social at @szndohrn.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Some good news during these difficult times. Please check out our new preprint. We built a new tool to probe the origins of high oocyte aneuploidy rates at advanced female reproductive ages. This NIH funded work was led by a fantastic postdoc in the lab, Jiyeon Leem. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint from my Postdoc in Zak Swartz’s lab at the @mblscience.bsky.social, in collaboration with Carsten Wolff and @. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint drop! Check out work from @jimmy-ly.bsky.social et al for how protein isoforms generated by alternate translation initiation create dual localization, contribute to mitochondrial function, and are mutated in disease. "Blue-tutorial" thread below. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...