Just approved an order for standard lab consumables. Prices have nearly doubled since starting the lab. Meanwhile, the bar for publishing keeps rising, requiring ever more costly experiments, while grant budgets barely changed. Hard to see how this is a sustainable trajectory for academic research.

Bitte unterschreiben, wenn ihr ein paar Sekunden Zeit habt - es ist wichtig!

At Heathrow hopefully heading home. Great @biologists.bsky.social Board meeting. Fun to be a small part of the team that makes @jcellsci.bsky.social , @jexpbiol.bsky.social , @dev-journal.bsky.social, @dmmjournal.bsky.social & @biologyopen.bsky.social happen. Choose society &non-profit journals!

Multi-ciliated cells drive many key events, including, for example, expelling pathogens and debris from our lung airways. @raghavan-thiaga.bsky.social Provides a great introduction to the cell biology behind this, and the many unanswered questions. Plus lovely images!! Check it out. 🧪

The awesome trio of @lmescu.bsky.social @fpichaud.bsky.social and Fernando Casares (and their teams) are on fire Fly eyes represent 'programmable metamaterials'; human engineering principles pre-exist in biology www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I missed the discussion around @qedscience.bsky.social ranking release. My take: I tried it on one of my published preprints. It did catch the major gap that we are aware of. The suggested solution was unusable. My impression (n=1) is that its feedback is internally consistent with the paper,...

Delighted to share our latest preprint "NucleiSky enables cross-scale multimodal registration of microscopy data using nuclei constellations" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Code and App: github.com/CellMigratio...

It is out 😍 check it out!! Multiscale integration of tissue and chromatin context converts cell heterogeneity into stable intestinal patterning. @cschwayer.bsky.social @silviabarbiero.bsky.social @davidbrueckner.bsky.social @ehannezo.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Hitze kostet und Hitze tötet#Kommentar#Hitze#KlimaErderwärmung

How does the plasma #membrane preserve its #lipid identity under stress? The Baskin and Balla labs report a homeostatic circuit linking PI4P, phosphatidylserine, RhoB, and phospholipase D-driven phosphatidic acid. hubs.la/Q04mQjrC0

I am thrilled to share my PhD work with @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social @embl.org: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... A fun collaboration with Bernat Corominas-Murtra, Adrián Aguirre-Tamaral, @bart-smeets.bsky.social , Jef Vanghel and Tom Belpaire! Read the story in the comments below ⤵️

Mechanical perturbation (pipetting) & Reassembly of 🐭colon epithelial organoids😎 Mimicking acute colon injury with epithelial contact/barrier disruption Organoid size-dependent effects of IL-11-JAK/STAT3 axis🤠 @takashi-nishina.bsky.social bioRxiv 2026 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

"Algae frequently get a bad press" 🤔 But reflecting further, most of the time they do good work. All about #algae in this excellent primer by John Raven and Mario Gordano www.cell.com/current-biol...

The array of organs in the animal body differ dramatically in their architecture, but cell-cell adhesion mediated by cadherins is a common principle. Our lab usually focuses on epithelia but cadherins are also active in migrating mesenchymal cells like these migrating testis myoblasts 1/n 🧪

Epithelial cells fire voltage spikes | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Every time I talk about how I love imaging metadata, people tell me they have to go get a drink at the bar

Great piece from @helenajambor.bsky.social There is another #LoPaT in the picture. Can you guess? Hint: The New Lena! 😂

Seems pretty simple: if you don’t want to get destroyed by Germany in soccer ⚽️, don’t wear a yellow-blue kit…

Der Tankrabatt kostet in zwei Monaten übrigens knapp 25-mal so viel wie die von der Bundesregierung versprochene und jetzt gestoppte Erhöhung der Wohnkostenpauschale beim BAFöG.

"Betrug in der Wissenschaft" @artede.bsky.social Wie falsche Anreize zu unlauterem Verhalten führen. Auch #IchBinHanna wird erwähnt und Tweets u.a. von @gudrunlotze.bsky.social, @sainethina.bsky.social und auch mir sind kurz zu sehen. Dieser Betrug ist nur ein Aspekt. 1/ youtu.be/bhPBU8k4WAQ

Pillai, E. K., Mukherjee, S., Gampl, N., McGinn, R. J., ... & Franze, K. (2026). Long-range chemical signalling in vivo is regulated by mechanical signals. Nature Materials, 1-11. doi.org/10.1038/s415... #EpithelialMechanics

Happy Pride Month. If you're a gay man, please remember your power. People often think that gay men are innately fashionable, which means if you wear some stupid shit for long enough, straight people, including homophobes, will copy you and then you can laugh at them.

New #preprint: "Stretching and bending of (really) thick elastic plates" arxiv.org/abs/2606.01889 Yet another paper from the #PhD work of @zhaoshh.bsky.social and yet another expansion of three-dimensional elasticity for some ε≪1. @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social

Virologists love typological thinking. Even when leads them to be wrong over and over again (including about COVID being airborne!), they will confidently cling to it.

Khozestani, F. R., Jafari, M., & Alisafaei, F. (2026). Vimentin reshapes epithelial collectives in 3D. Biophysical Journal, #EpithelialMechanics doi.org/10.1016/j.bp...

🧵 New protocol out in @cp-starprotocols.bsky.social! Step-by-step guide to infer forces in tissues using ForSys, by @borgesaugust.bsky.social, Jeronimo Miranda, Alberto Ceccarelli, Guilherme Ventura, @kuba-sedzinski.bsky.social, @hernanlopez-schier.bsky.social and I, www.cell.com/star-protoco...

🧪 Filoviruses are among the most lethal viruses known to infect humans. Yet despite decades of research, major questions about their ecology, evolution, host range, and potential for wider geographic spread remain unresolved. ➡️A thread on Ebola, Marburg, and related filoviruses.

Overall very cool stuff. A reconfigurable instrument that repurposes equipment investment in adaptive optics, SLM, lasers, to do a lot of different things 🧪

Katalin Karikó is one of the most extraordinary scientific stories of this era. A girl from a modest Hungarian household helped develop technology that saved millions of lives worldwide. In 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries that enabled effective mRNA vaccines.

Sneaking a giant screen into the flagshagger march is one of the funniest things @ledbydonkeys.org have ever done. "STAY HYDRATED" 😂🤣😂

Wenn Wale oder Eisbären leiden, bricht es vielen Menschen das Herz. Vergessen werden dagegen die glitschigen und krabbeligen Helden der Ökosysteme. Zeit für eine Würdigung. Mehr zu dem Thema lest ihr heute auf taz.de

🧵 While the world watches the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius, a quiet but important case just published in NEJM one human infection with H5N5. A woman in Washington state died from H5N5 avian influenza acquired from her backyard ducks. www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Kayal, S., Nguyen, A. Q., & Bi, D. (2025). The Rheology of Living Tissues: From Cells to Organismal Mechanics. Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, 17. #EpithelialMechanicsReview buff.ly/3GjxT0B

If you think Bluesky sucks, you are not using it correctly. I have curated my feed to be full of DeliciousWeirdos™️ and KingShitposters™️ which means endless nerdiness (complimentary), bangers, and really insightful threads. Sorry you aren't having fun you aren't playing right. Try harder!

While BioNtech & Moderna become household names because of their Covid vaccines, those emerged from different projects: finding ways to treat the most challenging cancers. They hypothesized that we could vaccinate patients against their own tumors, & evidence is mounting that they were right! 1/n 🧪

New #preprint: "Travelling waves of invasion in microbial communities with phenotypic switching" arxiv.org/abs/2605.10420 (I saw ε and expanded for ε ≪ 1 and a brilliant intern, Diego Manso Anda, realised that there was no need to.) @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social

Probably a good time for a few general caveats for those watching the developing story of the #hantavirus outbreak linked to the cruise ship MV Hondius - especially the more anxious ones among you. (Long-time followers will know most of this by heart at this point): 🧪

This exciting paper is now out in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Unlocking the therapeutic potential of cellular mechanobiology | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New #preprint: "Nonlinear isotropic odd elasticity" arxiv.org/abs/2605.02476 More from the #PhD work of @zhaoshh.bsky.social: revealing some of the surprising nonlinear mechanical behaviour of active, "odd" solids. @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social

How do epithelial cells integrate mechanical and biochemical signals to control their behavior? I am @ronjahoutekamer.bsky.social, and in this thread, I’ll show you how force transduction connects to biochemical signaling, and how it activates ERK by inducing biochemical ligand shedding.

My 2nd place image for the @bscb-official.bsky.social imaging competition. I made this during the Lunar new year period, or we call it Tet in Vietnam. Peach blossom 🌸 is the traditional flower that every family in the North would have during this time, so the image is certainly inspired by it.

A fantastic #postdoc opportunity to join us in Dresden @mpipks.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de @csbdresden.bsky.social or to join @biohub.org. Apply by the 20th of May!

John Gurdon (1933-2025) Sir John Gurdon was a towering figure in developmental biology, respected and admired throughout the world. In this Obituary, Jim Smith writes about his legacy. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...