Aurélien Courtois

Unearthing the secrets of Australia’s most enigmatic and cryptic mammal, the marsupial mole The marsupial mole’s genome unearths their phylogenetic status and insights into convergent evolution in subterranean mammals.

Stephen R. Frankenberg et al. (2025)

Unearthing the secrets of Australia’s most enigmatic and cryptic mammal, the marsupial mole

Science Advances 11(1): eado4140

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ado4140

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Embryonic signatures of intergenerational epigenetic inheritance across paternal environments and genetic backgrounds | The EMBO Journal imageimagePaternal environmental exposures have been linked with modulation of phenotype and disease risk in offspring via largely unclear mechanisms. This study employs in vitro fertilization and sin...

❓Can a father’s environmental exposures before conception influence their offspring?

We systematically tackled this - identifying effects of paternal age, environment and genetics on early embryos - as well as confounding influences

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

✨Nervous about development? Don’t be! 🧠 E13.5 🐁 embryo showing nerves (🩵) and endothelial cells (💙) weaving together in the developing pup 🔬 image by Nathan Burns 🧪 #FluorescenceFriday #DevBio #MouseEmbryo

Welcome Edith Heard Today, Edith Heard begins her tenure as Chief Executive Officer of the Francis Crick Institute

Today, Edith Heard begins her tenure as our new Chief Executive Officer. Edith joins us from @embl.org, and will head up the new Developmental Epigenetics Laboratory alongside her executive role.

www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

Marsupial single-cell transcriptomics identifies temporal diversity in mammalian developmental programs Menchero et al. generate a single-cell transcriptomic atlas in the opossum and show rapid progression of transcriptional programs in specific tissues relative to morphological landmarks. This shift in...

Thrilled to share that our latest work on marsupial heterochrony is now online at @cp-devcell.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social @lab-turner.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk We used scRNAseq to understand the asynchronous progression of developmental programmes in marsupials www.cell.com/developmenta...

In Paris for a nice ''colloque'' on X chromosome inactivation. Looking forward to it!
www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/co...

Who doesn't like looking at stunning images showcasing the beauty of #DevBio?? 😍

Divergent DNA methylation dynamics in marsupial and eutherian embryos - Nature A study reports on the DNA methylation dynamics during embryogenesis in marsupials, showing that these differ from those occurring during embryogenesis in eutherian mammals.

We're excited to publish our latest study led by Bryony Leeke @bryonyleeke.bsky.social and Wazeer Varsally, now out in @nature.com 🍾This study focusses on the epigenome of marsupial embryos 🦘 mapping DNA methylation in embryo development to specific embryo events www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵

New paper from our lab !
DNA methylation dynamic is different in marsupial embryos compared to eutherian embryos.

Light-sheet is amazing ! Nice work from Kenzo and his lab. !!

Enjoyed a lot the Developmental Biology GRC 2025 last month.
Thank you @swathiarur.bsky.social, Kathy Cheah and Anna Kircheva for organising it!
Looking forward to the 2027 edition !

Bioimage Analysis Conference 2025 in Kobe GloBIAS Bioimage Analysis Conference 2025 Oct 26, 2025 - Oct 31, 2025 | Kobe, Japan Venue: RIKEN BDR, Kobe, Japan Registration via Google Forms here: https://tinyurl.com/3dtajhh6 Please follow the l...

The Crick is part of the organisation of a bioimage analysis conference in Kobe, Japan, 26-31 October 2025.
It includes training school, hackathon, taggathon and symposium, and there is travel support for training school attendees:
www.globias.org/activities/b...

A woman studies embryos for decades, struggles for funding and respect. She publishes under her husband’s name, until they divorce. A single mother, she moves across an ocean to continue her studies. It all sounds quite modern, until you learn that she also worried she’d be burned as a witch. 🧵 1/15

Unfortunately, James cannot make it to the Developmental Biology GRC. So, I will give his talk instead. See you in California. #GordonConf

If you think we all should have cool science themed Tshirts, go follow him on instagram and ask him to design your ideas !

A picture of me standing in front of my poster, #54 at the conference.

Forgot to post.
Come talk to me about why opossum are such an amazing developmental model. #Beddingtonconf

Jean-Leon in front of his title slide.

Very excited by the line up at the Beddington symposium this year.
lot of great speakers (@maitrejl.bsky.social depicted)

Congrats Jérémie, good luck on your exciting post-doc !

Also, we will answer the questions ! Sorry about the delay. 🙂

Thanks preLights for highlighting our preprint !

Looking for labs working on afrotheria embryo development.

Does anybody work on elephant shrews, hyraxes, tenrecs ... ?

@mpi-ie.bsky.social
7th epigenetics meeting has started. Come talk to me if you're around poster #12. Topics: Opossum, mouse, X inactivation, sex chromosomes, development...

Congrats Barbara !

Congrats Thibaut !!

Thank you Julie !

- Sex chromosomes shape gene expression across autosomes during preimplantation.

- The Y chromosome and genes escaping X-inactivation deeply impact the trophectoderm.

- The paternal and maternal X promote embryonic growth differently.

Our (Turner lab.) latest preprint is out! 🐭🧬We show that sex chromosomes regulate the transcriptional and developmental landscape of the mouse preimplantation embryo.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks ! Happy to have feedbacks or comments on it.

We're here ! At least 2 of us... 😊
@sermenchero.bsky.social and myself, no Turner official account for now.
Thanks for picking up our BioRxiv so quickly.

- Sex chromosomes shape gene expression across autosomes during preimplantation.

- The Y chromosome and genes escaping X-inactivation deeply impact the trophectoderm.

- The paternal and maternal X promote embryonic growth differently.