Scott Coyle

Thanks Claudia ! Full credit to Maggie for making the story so epic in scope. Also: will you be at ASCB this year? Hope to see you again some time soon

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth!
#protistsonsky 🧵

Our new preprint describes Plasmodium NEK4 as a key regulator coupling meiotic initiation and morphogenesis—a critical step for malaria transmission. This involves MTOC-driven nuclear movement strikingly analogous to "horsetail" movement in fission yeast.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Wow! Remarkably complete story on the logic of phenotypic plasticity in a predatory protist - congrats @cellraiser.bsky.social et al!

Thanks Ben! You've set a high bar for protist excellence that continues to inspire and motivate our thinking :)

Thrilled to share our work on the 🔥 single-celled predator Podophrya collini, which rewires its cell morphology to hunt more efficiently. Huge thanks to our amazing team—Amy, Lauren, Omaya, Marine, Mari, and especially Scott—for making this shine! ✨

My jaw is still recovering tbh 😂 reconstructive surgery scheduled for next week

Very happy to see this out there ! Amazing work by @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social @amyweeks.bsky.social & @cellraiser.bsky.social!

All #ProtistsOnSky are amazing, but when I bumbed into @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social & her poster 2y ago at a #GRC conference, I got the urge to attempt #ExpnasionMicroscopy!
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Finally – there are many mysteries to still resolve for these cells. From dramatic metamorphic capabilities🤯 to prey preference and detection mechanisms 🕵️. For anyone interested in collaborating or getting their hands on these cells, these fantastic beasts culture well and we’re happy to share!

Photographs of Omaya and Marine from the Dudin group; and Amy and Lauren from the Weeks group. Rockstars!

We couldn’t have taken this study to the next level without Omaya and Marine from team @dudinlab.bsky.social and Amy and Lauren from team @amyweeks.bsky.social . Together their talents brought the additional molecular and structural clarity we needed to model this circuit’s behavior fully.

Photographs of Zhejing "Maggie" Xu, an extraordinary gifted, hard-working, and brilliant grad student who is as comfortable at the bench or IDE as she is in the field. Truly an amazing individual whose passion for suctorian, protists, and cell biology more generally is in a class all its own

This work shines because of @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social passion for these cells. She built it all—the cultures, transcriptomes, analyses, modeling and collaborations—from scratch. I can’t begin to express how brilliant and hard-working a scientist she is (and she's 👀 for postdocs!). So proud of her 🥲

Figure showing how P. collini self-organizing single-cell morphology circuit can be re-parameterized, extended, or abstracted to apply to a range of different natural and synthetic cellular systems

More broadly, this circuit’s architecture provides a general control logic for organizing number and size of natural and engineered sub-cellular structures. Morphological circuits like this one can be viewed as building blocks for cell structure, analogous to network motifs and circuit topologies.

Figure showing trap structure scaling configurations for diverse suctorian species.

While our model was built to describe P. collini’s trap scaling, we found that the trap geometries of other suctorian species from different niches could be modeled as re-parameterizations or extensions of this same core control logic!

Figure showing core control logic of P. collini cell morphology circuit and associated simulations of feeding and starvation single-cell trajectories that match experimental observations.

From this, we built a mathematical model of a single-cell morphology circuit that captures the resource allocation and feedback that optimizes P. collini trap structure, in which deterministic growth of tentacles competing for free resources is interrupted by stochastic jumps in tentacle number.

Key transcripts encoded centrin-like proteins, a frequent component of sensory/contractile structures in protists. We visualized tentacle ultrastructure by U-ExM with @dudinlab.bsky.social lab, discovering stunning tip and collar structures 🤯that add structural complexity to new tentacle formation.

Figure showing a volcano plot of proteomics data for starved/unstarved P. collini cells; and a transcriptomics experiment showing waves of transcripts associated with tentacle biogenesis.

Working with the @amyweeks.bsky.social lab, we used a combination of drug perturbation, proteomics, and sequencing experiments to delineate the cellular mechanisms that control trap structure maintenance and tentacle number. Critically, new tentacle formation required new transcription.

From single-cell feeding trajectories, we found that P. collini can adaptively remodel its trap structure towards the optimal configuration, expanding it upon capture and dismantling it during starvation. So what encodes the scaling and functional adaptation of the tentacle trap?

Figure showing the scaling of P. collini tentacle trap geometry, the associated "capture capacity" of the trap, and the observation that these geometries appear to be the optimal resource allocation for prey capture

From >100,000 single-cell morphologies, we found that P. collini’s trap architecture scales anisotropically, favoring tentacle number over length. Remarkably, the observed scaling appeared to allocate available resources and organize trap geometry optimally for prey capture.

We found that P. collini traps display a broad range of morphological configurations: tentacle numbers from 1-25; and tentacle lengths ~15-30 um. To study this variation systematically, we built a deep-learning pipeline and suctorian-viewer app that digitizes the 3D morphology of P. collini cells.

Cellular structure self-organizes through an interplay between internal mechanisms and external cues. The single-celled suctorian P. collini builds a trap structure to capture large prey using microtubule feeding tentacles, creating feedback between cell morphology and prey availability.

How do cells adapt morphology to function? In a 🔥 preprint by @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social , with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @amyweeks.bsky.social , we identify a self-organizing single-cell morphology circuit that optimizes the feeding trap structure of the suctorian P. collini. 🧵 tinyurl.com/4k8nv926

We’re hiring! 🚨
Assistant Professor (TT) in Theoretical or Computational Biological Physics @univmiami.bsky.social 😀

Come build the future of interdisciplinary biophysics with us!
Apply by Dec 15 → tinyurl.com/5n9bk836

#Biophysics #PhysicsJobs #AcademicJobs #UMiami

Congratulations Omaya and crew -- such an amazing data set and resource for cell biology 🎉!

🚨Our collaboration with @centriolelab.bsky.social & @gautamdey.bsky.social is out today in @cp-cell.bsky.social
We show that #Expansion #Microscopy is a broad-spectrum modality for Euks, enabling 3D phenotypic maps rooted to phylogeny.
#ProtistsOnSky #SciComm #SciSky

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Liquid metals can spontaneously bulge, protrude, branch and slither in response to certain ions in their environment. This happens due to the Marangoni effect, which starts with uneven changes in the… Slithering liquid metal motivated by chemistry | Headline Science

What's creepy and chemistry? Look back at this gallium-based liquid metal that squirms due to an electron-transfer reaction that changes the surface tension of the alloy.⚡

Researchers are investigating the serpentine locomotion of liquid metals for potential applications in soft electronics. [1/2]

An intimate conversation about what drives me every day in “sharing experience” of science by getting tools of science in hands of kids everywhere.

themicroscopists.bitesizebio.com/episodes/man...

Paralogs with distinct phase behaviors broaden the in vivo stress response range of condensates Paralogs are widespread, but their physiological roles are often masked by redundancy. H-NS, a nucleoid-associated protein in Gram-negative bacteria, typically coexists with paralogs such as StpA, who...

Bacteria use paralog teamwork to survive stress.
H-NS forms fluid condensates; its partner StpA forms rigid fibrils. Together, they balance flexibility & stability to keep genes properly regulated under pressure.
#PhaseSeparation #Bacteria
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Andrea Putnam awarded 2025 Packard Fellowship - School of Medicine and Public Health

Andrea A. Putnam, a UW School of Medicine and Public Health assistant professor of biomolecular chemistry, has been named a 2025 Packard Foundation Fellow in Science and Engineering. Congratulations, Dr. Putnam!

Final version of our paper on ciliary metachronal waves out now in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia...

This is the main thesis work of my PhD student Rebecca Poon, who caught many #platnereis larvae and tirelessly ablated them with a laser. THREAD

Join us ! We are looking for creative and motivated scientists at to join the group. We are recruiting candidates from various scientific backgrounds including, but not limited to: biophysics, physics, biochemi...

We have PhD and Postdoc positions open in our group. Join us in Lausanne to explore how cells pull off extreme shape changes and how cilia drive biological flows.

You can find more details on the projects available and how to apply in our website:

www.epfl.ch/labs/lpl/joi...