Introducing Cyclically Multiplexed Expansion Microscopy (Cy-ExM): a workflow for 3D nanoscale, high-plex imaging in whole cells. Cryo-preserved ultrastructure + iterative labeling + expansion microscopy → 20 targets in one dataset with ~70 nm lateral resolution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It’s certainly been a year, but I’m incredibly grateful that earlier in 2025 I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure! Huge thanks to you all for promoting our work here and on the other site, for talk invites, for writing letters of support, and to the lab for all their contributions. 🥂

Unfortunately the drop in ESI funding rates is not paired with changes in funding required to get tenure. It’s not just the next three years of our labs at risk, but the rest of our careers. We are also the cohort that started in the COVID pandemic- it’s been nothing but “unprecedented times”…

Most transcriptomics studies sample ~0.001% of a mouse. Which region do we choose? Often: we guess. Meet DISCO-seq 🤗 flipping the order: RNA-preserving clearing → whole-organ/whole-body 3D imaging → pick ROIs in 3D → unbiased scRNA-seq. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In a paper out this month in @jcb.org we present evidence implicating intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) as key to junctional assembly and function 2/n 🧪 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41099653/

Our new work Cilia.io is out on the Rxiv. Ece Atayeter and Jason Ho trained an ML computer vision transformer for detection and quantification of cilia morphology and dynamics. We will provide a GUI soon. Another great collaboration w/ @jbwallingford.bsky.social

🚨 Preprint Friday! 🚨 Thrilled to highlight this collab with David Brown at Duke @cutitoutdave.bsky.social and Ken Poss at UW Madison/Morgridge @kenposs.bsky.social. By comparing 3(!!) regenerating models we identify a conserved role for Sp-family TFs in appendage regeneration (and more).....🧵

UNC's Center for Molecular Medicine has up to three open-rank positions for faculty conducting research with relevance to gene therapy, including: novel iPSC and animal models of disease and basic cell biology. Join us in beautiful Chapel Hill! Deadline 1/31/26: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/309...

Flashback #FluorescenceFriday to some of the first light-sheet imaging we were doing. Video shows the collecting duct system of the developing kidney labeled with a pan-cytokeratin antibody. Courtesy of former talented technician Deanna Hardesty.

🆕 KidneyCure is committing up to $6 million over three years to help eligible NIH R01 applicants ranked in the top 15% continue their kidney research with a $100K award. Learn more and explore every KidneyCure opportunity: https://bit.ly/kcgrantsfunding

We present multi-immersion Oblique Plane microscope (miOPM), a light-sheet platform that can be adapted to a wide range of applications, from sensitive live cell imaging to imaging organs and cleared tissues. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sharing this excellent review now out from postdoc Sarah McLarnon! Lots of useful info on 3D imaging, quantification of imaging data, and how this has been applied to the kidney. And since it's #FluorescenceFriday, sharing a figure with our own imaging data! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For #FluorescenceFriday, RhoA (blue) and the actin cytoskeleton (magenta) are shown in a set of primary microglia 🔬 #Neuroscience #Microscopy

My entry for today’s #FluorescenceFriday: a pupal #Drosophila testis with muscles expressing 🔵 lifeact & 🔴 RFP-nls Honored & grateful to receive an honorable mention at @healthcare.nikon.com Nikon Small World 🌍🔬✨ 🔗 www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20... #NikonSmallWorld #Microscopy #ScienceArt

For this #FluorescenceFriday, a gorgeous image of an adult mouse kidney labeled with AQP2 and alpha SMA antibodies. AQP2 (green) marks the collecting duct and distal connecting segment while SMA marks the arterial tree. Courtesy of talented postdoc Sarah McLarnon.

Rescued these two beauties today, one stuck in the parking garage stairwell and one from inside the house (and rescued from 3 very interested cats)

Sensory neurons drive pancreatic cancer progression through glutamatergic neuron-cancer pseudo-synapses @cp-cancercell.bsky.social www.cell.com/cancer-cell/...

This is me, one of those 211. My A1 R01 renewal would have been funded otherwise, and I was even initially told they planned to fund it. Now very unlikely. No more chances with this one. We had so many good things going-how do we keep moving forward? A question many of us will be asking.

How can cells self-organize rapidly into complex patterns during development? Let’s explore a powerful and underappreciated mechanism: Directed Cell Migration (DCM). Preprint @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1101/2025... 👇Thread 🧵(1/11)

Intermediate mesoderm isn't the sole contributor to nephrons in zebrafish-new manuscript out showing somites are a source of nephron progenitors! Very cool, dogma challenging study led by Alan Davidson's group. Many fun discussions were had-grateful for the inclusion! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

The NIH was healthiest when pay lines were in the 20th percentile range. We are headed into an environment where pay lines are in the 5% range. In my entire career, I’ve only had 3 grants that scored better than 5%. And my lab is considered a successful one. This is going to destroy science.

A beautiful tour through an AAV-PHP.B-GFP-transduced intact cochlea as visualized via lightsheet microscopy after tissue clearing. Magenta is a hair cell marker, yellow is a neuron marker, and green is AAV-GFP (relatively low hair cell transduction rate in this specific sample).

#FluorescenceFriday! Thanks BPoD!

Surprise catch while surf fishing! No baby sharks harmed, was safely released back into the ocean. 🦈

For #FluorescenceFriday I'm sharing the fantastic work of postdoc Sarah McLarnon! A follow up to our '23 Development paper where we asked: Does precise vascular patterning matter for function and what happens after ischemic injury? The results were surprising! journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

Evening visitor to the feeder showing off the ruby throat 😍

Check out the latest from Alan Davidson’s lab (of zf kidney regeneration fame) showing somites contribute to making nephrons in zebrafish. GESTALT, Cre lineage tracing, and zf somite transplants 😱. Love a good story that challenges dogma. Great discussions were had! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

WATCH: Elephants at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park react to Monday's 5.2 magnitude earthquake that shook San Diego County. The elephants formed an "alert circle" meant to protect the young and the entire herd from any threats, according to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

Finally out! Brittney Voigt et al show the shared role of Inppl1a expansion of notochord vacuolated cells and also for hypertrophy of chondorcytes and bone lengthening. @currentbiology.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

20 minutes ago here in Venetie, Alaska, the skies erupted in a beautiful auroral substorm. Here is just one of many real-time videos I recorded during the show to give you a sense of how fast and dynamic the aurora can move.

A friend drove two hours today for her breast cancer chemotherapy only to learn it was canceled due to NIH cuts. Clinical trial ended midstream. No treatment, no restart, no plan, no information. Her bro-in-law's chemo was also canceled.

When you've been in the cell culture hood all day and finally get to take off your gloves:

Exciting work from the UNC Kidney Center this week: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40020049/. Posting because we don't have an official account here (yet), but some excellent folks in our lab discovered important steps in the mechanism by which hydrANCAzine causes...well.. ANCA! #NephSky #MedSky 🧵

Congrats to @llobrienlab.bsky.social on winning an Innovative Science Accelerator Award from @isackuh.bsky.social! She pioneered whole tissue 3D imaging of #kidney nerves. Now she will map changes in these nerves from acute injury to chronic disease for the first time! med.unc.edu/cellbiophysi...

🔬🎤 As pre-announced a few days ago... please let us proudly present to you: 𝑴𝒊𝒄𝒓𝒐𝕊𝒑𝒍𝒊𝒕 - your ticket to imaging more, imaging more gentle, and/or imaging more efficient. 🔬 doi.org/10.1101/2025... Like ❤️, repost 🔂, and most importantly... please send feedback ✉️ our way! 🙏

I am actively looking for a research scientist position or research administration role within the Raleigh-Durham (RDU) area! Please reach out if my background and skillset might fit your labs needs :-) Lots of experience with preclinical models, translational neuroscience, and behavioral analyses!

🎉 Happy Valentine's Day, we love you science! ❤️ #FluorescenceFriday #sciart #neuroart

Brainbow marks cells in red Others in blue Tracked over time Reveals lineage true #ScienceValentines

My annual Valentine’s post of this image that happens to land on #FluorescenceFriday this year! An axon approaching a kidney glomerulus doing its best to look like a rose.

For #FluorescenceFriday, large lipid droplets (orange) and alpha-spectrin (blue) are shown in adipocytes 🔬 #Microscopy #CellBiology

An ancient unpublished picture from my PhD #FluorescenceFriday! Drosophila sperm pump depth-coded with muscles (phalloidin=cyan/green) + Dapi (yellow/red). Not confocal but an old Zeiss Apotome - which is still an awesome scope! #sciart #microscopy #bioart #sciart #microscopyart #cellbio #devbio

Congratulations to my PhD student Ike Emerson for showing sex differences in the heart are regulated through X-linked miRNAs and a big thank you to Bill Marzluff! www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10....

A huge effort and amazing advance by this team! Check out the preprint link below. We were amazed with what we could get out of our samples (those are our kidneys below!). Major thanks to @kevin-dean.bsky.social for including us.

Nerves and glomeruli in the developing kidney for this #FluorescenceFriday

Happy #FluorescenceFriday to those who celebrate! Here's a beautiful quail neural tube and somites labelled for microtubules 🟠 and actin 🔵. Imaged by Power-RA Siew Zhuan Tan. #devbio 🧪🔬👩‍🔬

This morning’s sunrise ahead of the winter storm was 😍

1st Preprint from Pickering lab!😆 #SciArt Intussusceptive angiogenesis-on-a-chip: Evidence for transluminal vascular bridging by endothelial delamination Real-time transluminal #EndothelialCell pillariogenesis #IntussusceptiveAngiogenesis😎 bioRxiv 2024 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Gorgeous imaging below! Look at those vessels!

not #microscopeMonday🔬 not #fluorescenceFriday: #TestingTuesday 🤦‍♂️. Assessing 3D algos today. @wythelab.bsky.social & @llobrienlab.bsky.social turned me on to evans blue as an epithelial marker. BTW, algo failed (hint: rt hemisphere aysmmetry). Lightsheet microscope from @the.3i.social