Andrew Gordus

Years ago @lauragrima.bsky.social talked about what a pity it is when scientists who work on #foraging miss out on fruitful interactions because they work with different animals. Together with collegues we started a virtual seminar series, which grew into a conference and now a review!

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

Happy to announce that @ajblake05.bsky.social’s JEB paper was selected as this month’s Editors Choice article. This article discovered that mosquito color/wavelength preferences shift depending on the odor they experience.

New paper on the role of H3K4me3 at enhancers! We (led by Haoming Yu) used dCas9 epigenome editing to add H3K4me3 to intergenic enhancers. This was (1) sufficient to turn up transcription at open, active regions and (2) has no effect on target gene transcription. genesdev.cshlp.org/content/earl...

If you are in the Baltimore area and want to get away from the heat, come down to the Parkway Theater for a screening of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse at 4 pm today! I’ll be giving a short talk beforehand on the natural superpowers of spiders.

parkway.eventive.org/schedule/683...

Evolution and homology of leg segments in Chelicerata: Evo-devo solutions to century-old challenges A major theme in the evolution of Arthropoda is the origin and diversification of jointed appendages. One appealing framework for the evolution of art…

A new review paper from the lab—fun times with sea spider and daddy-long legs embryos!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

From what was communicated to us, yes. What a disaster.

It was a beautiful day yesterday at the Lincoln Memorial! #standupforscience2025

A chromosome-level genome of the giant vinegaroon Mastigoproctus giganteus exhibits the signature of pre-Silurian whole genome duplication Abstract. Within the arachnids, chromosome-level genome assemblies have greatly accelerated the understanding of gene family evolution and developmental ge

The lab is delighted to release the first genome for the giant American vinegaroon! The slowly-evolving order Uropygi captures the strongest signature yet of the arachnopulmonate whole genome duplication. #biodiversity #genomics

academic.oup.com/jhered/advan...

Olfaction with legs—Spiders use wall-pore sensilla for pheromone detection | PNAS The sense of smell is a central sensory modality of most terrestrial species. However, our knowledge of olfaction is based on vertebrates and insec...

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Olfaction in spiders. We found that the wall pore sensilla in spiders look similar from the outside to those of insects, but differ ultrastructurally in various ways. Independent evolution!
🧪

Our preprint "The tardigrade as an emerging model organism for systems neuroscience" is up. We have been making the case for some time that tardigrades, aka water bears, would be an amazing new model organism for certain big systems neuroscience questions. We put this into a detailed paper o...

For our inaugural post on bsky, we're happy to share our preprint on tardigrades as a new model organism for neuroscience. Exciting times for these little critters! www.focolab.org/post/our-pre...

Very happy to share our paper on the sense of smell in spiders.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
#chemicalecology, #pheromon, #sensoryorgans #spiders,

The case against simplistic genetic explanations of evolution Summary: Extreme traits in animals, from the origin of limbs to the loss of tails, capture public attention. This Review argues that scientists should not seek simple explanations for how they evolved...

Please read and share this ⬇️

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Our DNA is not randomly stuffed into the nucleus but has a defined architecture that's key to chromosome mechanics and gene regulation. This is a very informative review for anyone like me who teaches this material or to those outside the field who want a clear and cogent summary 🧪

Order matters: neurons in the human brain fire in sequences that encode information A timing-based code for semantic knowledge in humans complements the established role of firing rates in neural coding.

Order matters: neurons in the human brain fire in sequences that encode information www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thanks for the shout-out, Navin!

The eLife Model: An update on progress following changes in Web of Science indexing status Following the decision that eLife will not receive an Impact Factor in 2025, we share an update on how our model is doing since we were first placed “on hold” by Web of Science, and what we’re up to…

Following the news that eLife will not receive an Impact Factor in 2025, we’ve shared an update on how our model is doing since we were first placed “on hold” by Web of Science, and what we’re up to now. Find out more.
https://buff.ly/3ATRAFT

Visualization of the optical paths of the lensed images. The two zig-zag paths, D and F, are marked in pink and blue respectively. The deflectors cause two sets of sharp turns, while the smooth curvature seen in all paths is due to the expansion of space.

Astronomers have just discovered the first known "Einstein zigzag."

Due to a lucky cosmic alignment, the combined gravity of two galaxies bent light like spaghetti & split a distant quasar into six different images. 🧪🔭

www.science.org/content/arti...

Title and abstract of the memoriam in the Journal of Cell Biology in the link

In September the world lost one of the great biologists of our time: Joe Gall. He bridged the transition from the histology era of cell biology to our molecular present, contributing a remarkable set of insights in his 9 decades 1/n 🧪
rupress.org/jcb/article-...

Serial section micrographs of C. elegans showing a chemosensory neuron cilium poking through ECM layer and two mechanosensory neuron cilia fully embedded in ECM.

"Specialized structure and function of the apical extracellular matrix at sense organs"
doi.org/10.1016/j.cd...

Your sensory neurons don't just dangle out into the world.

They are covered by ECM that selectively transmits forces, tastes, or odors, or focuses light.

A toolkit for testing membrane localisation tags across species Transgenic markers and tools have revolutionised how we study cells and developing organisms. Some of the elements needed to construct those tools are universally applicable (e.g. fluorescent proteins...

Looking for a tag to localise fluorescent proteins to the plasma membrane? Unsure which tag might work in your species? We generated a toolkit of 11 membrane-localising tags, which can be screened rapidly by microinjecting mRNA in your species of interest. 1/4
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks Navin and Vivek!