I had the privilege to interact with desmoid tumor patients at the annual #DTRF meeting in Chicago. An inspiring & motivating event! Great to talk to Athina Merckx, granddaughter of the greatest Belgian cyclist ever, brave desmoid patient and fantastic fundraiser #Athinasride @crighent.bsky.social

How to find Evolutionary Conserved Enhancers in 2025? 🐣-🐭 Check out our paper - fresh off the press!!! We find widespread functional conservation of enhancers in absence of sequence homology Including: a bioinformatic tool to map sequence-diverged enhancers! rdcu.be/enVDN github.com/tobiaszehnde...

We are hiring #postdocs and #phd students in the areas of #devbio #cellbio #Bioinformatics #mathematics #modeling. This is the full add with details: euraxess.de/jobs/346670 This our lab homepage: www.uniklinik-freiburg.de/walentek-en....

Paper Alert!! Last year we reported on ZFHX3 loss of function (LoF), today we report that also ZFHX4 LoF is associated with an NDD. Great collaboration the ZFHX4 consortium, excellently led by María del Rocío Perez Baca and María Palomares. As always great collab with co-supervisor Bert Callewaert.

During embryonic development, we need to build brains that contain a huge diversity of different types of neurons and glia. Single-cell studies tell us that there are more than 3000 kinds of neurons in the brain, and as many as 120-130 in the eye. www.jneurosci.org/content/40/2...

Aanandita Kothurkar, @colinchulab.bsky.social, Ryan MacDonald and colleagues @ucleye.bsky.social apply IBEX to simultaneously identify all the major retinal cell types. Highlight: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/... Article: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

We have just launched a call for our PhD excellence award 2025! This 5000 Euro prize wants to reward a young scientist for outstanding achievements in cell and/or developmental biology [PhD done in a Belgian lab]. Deadline March 1, 2025. bscdb.be/phd-excellen...

By definition, enhancers can activate from a distance. But with increased distance between enhancer and promoter, the activation drops. To study this systematically, we build a synthetic locus: www.cell.com/molecular-ce... 1/12

With a little help of my very own offspring as stand-in instructor

The excitement of watching #Xenopus embryos' early development at Ghent University's Science Day .... and recruiting a future generation of PhD students🐸 @ds-ugent.bsky.social @frogwranglers.bsky.social