Caroline Beck

Since the collective noun for frogs is an army, he can also be credited with generating the first clone army. 🐸🧪✊

Sir John is best known for his Nobel prize winning work on somatic cell nuclear transfer (cloning).

RIP Professor Sir John Gurdon, who inspired so many of us in Developmental Biology, and of course, “the frog”.

The whole mount ISH images are fantastic.

Single‐cell sequencing reveals potential novel insights into appendage‐patterning and joint‐development in a spider Background Jointed appendages represent one of the key innovations of arthropods, and thus understanding the development and evolution of these structures is important for the understanding of the e...

If for some reason you do not already love arthropod appendages, check this paper!!
Single‐cell sequencing reveals potential novel insights into appendage‐patterning and joint‐development in a spider - Medina‐Jiménez - Developmental Dynamics anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Dr Banerjee nailing it at #IXC25 meeting. Just look at the size of the screen we are presenting on! 🐸🧪🐸🧬

The amazing Matt Guille opens the meeting

Wow, International Xenopus Meeting (IXC25) -- Matt Guille and EXRC opens the meeting with old friends new science @xenbase.bsky.social xenopusresource.org/20th-interna...
#science #devbio #xenopus #frogs

Off to a great start this afternoon with a fabulous plenary from Aaron Zorn.

Hey! Any #xenopus folk at IXC25 in Portsmouth? Use #IXC25 in your posts, and let us know how it’s going!!

Harvard University lays off fly database team The layoffs jeopardize this resource, which has served more than 4,000 labs for about three decades.

FlyBase, a Drosophila database, will lose a third of its team in early October because the Harvard grant that covered the employees’ salaries was canceled. Scientists warn that losing FlyBase could devastate fly research.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/community/ha...

Single-cell spatial transcriptomic atlas of the whole mouse brain Han et al. used snRNA-seq and Stereo-seq to generate a detailed mouse brain atlas with over 4 million spatially resolved cells and 29,655 genes. Their findings include region- enriched cell clusters a...

A super cool #single-cell spatial transcriptomic mouse #brain atlas is out! 🐭🧠🔬
Unveiling cell types, #gene expression, & TF dynamics across the whole brain!
Awesome! ✨
#neuroskyence #neuroscience #compneurosky

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

#neuroskyence #EpilepsyResearchConfrerence

Thrilled to share that our latest work on #DravetSyndrome is now out as a preprint! 🚀
This project, brilliantly led by @clarazourray.bsky.social and co-supervised by Serena Barral, brought together an incredible team.
A huge thanks to everyone involved, exciting science ahead! 👏
shorturl.at/NdC79

Epilepsy Research Institute (@epilepsyinst.bsky.social) Radically advancing epilepsy research.

Excited for day one of the first @ epilepsyinst.bsky.social conference! If you ever wanted to know how tadpoles can help us understand DEE please come and chat at poster 2

Unilateral loss of recql4 function in Xenopus laevis tadpoles leads to ipsilateral ablation of the forelimb, hypoplastic Meckel's cartilage and vascular defects. RECQL4 encodes a RecQ helicase, one of a family of DNA unwinding enzymes with roles in DNA replication, double strand break repair and genomic stability. Pathogenic variants in RECQL4 are clinically a...

Excited to share our new 🧪 preprint! We show how useful #Xenopus tadpoles, which can be CRISPR engineered on one side, can be for understanding rare genetic disorders that affect growth and development. A study of recql4, with Louise Bicknell and Matt Riley-Bell.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The genetic basis of human height Nature Reviews Genetics - Genetic factors that influence human height encompass rare monogenic variants as well as common and rare polygenic variants. In this Review, Bicknell et al. summarize our...

The genetic basis of human height go.nature.com/4lnM152 #Review by Louise S. Bicknell, @joelhirschhorn.bsky.social & Ravi Savarirayan
Free to read here: rdcu.be/egGQf
@universityofotago.bsky.social @bostonchildrens.bsky.social @harvardmed.bsky.social @broadinstitute.org @mcri.bsky.social

If you, like me, get excited about appendages, it’s hard not love a velvet worm. Hydraulic #lobopods for legs, slime guns, a hidden knife in its jaws… and now bug of the year NZ 2025. Superb.

Jaeger et al. screened Adeno-associated viral tools (AAVs) in three different amphibian species brains identifying serotypes that transduce neurons. Published in Developmental Cell. www.xenbase.org/xenbase/doNe... #science #devbio #xenopus #frogs

Two southern bell froglets looking adorable on a rock.

Our @zoologyotago.bsky.social department is home to many wonderful animals. These two adorable Southern Bell froglets were raised by Zoology PhD student Bryony Alden, and are part of a group destined for the display tank in our foyer. They just need to grow up a bit first! 🧪 #outreach #ambassadors

Welcome to the blue sky Jon!

Human-driven evolution of color in a stonefly mimic Rapid adaptation is thought to be critical for the survival of species under global change, but our understanding of human-induced evolution in the wild remains limited. We show that widespread defore...

Excited to see our team’s work on insect colour evolution published in Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A sad day for basic /fundamental research, our government has scrapped Marsden funding to humanities and social science and the sky for science just got a little less blue. 😭🧪

📌

Best question following a talk today.. “if these frogs have thousands of offspring, why isn’t the world covered in frogs?”

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019).

The renamed:

Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

@phoebechapman.bsky.social latest paper on how #Xenopus tadpole skin gets colonised by microbiota. 🧪🐸🦠

Assembloids have emerged as a powerful tool for studying previously inaccessible processes of development and tissue homeostasis.

In our article in Cell Stem Cell, we summarize advances in the generation & application of neural and non-neural #assembloids to explore complex cell-cell interactions.

Condolences

Hello world! We’re here to spread the love of our favorite model organism Xenopus. Give us a follow for your daily moment of Xen(opus)!

Yay! Welcome to the blue sky fellow xenopodian!