Suraj Shankar 🏳️‍🌈

The lab’s first pre-print! We investigated how growth-inducing Erk activity waves are regulated in regenerating zebrafish scales. We discovered that Erk waves are followed by waves of expression of their own inhibitors, as predicted by excitable waves theory. tinyurl.com/26r2cmpj

Geometry, Mechanics and the Physics of Growth - 2025 - YouTube Program Geometry, Mechanics and the Physics of Growth ORGANIZERS: Joel Marthelot (Aix-Marseille University, France), S Ganga Prasath (IIT Madras, India) and ...

For those who want to follow the lectures online, they are recorded and uploaded on YouTube - youtube.com/playlist?lis...

🙊

Workshop poster

Excited to be at ICTS for the school on Geometry, Mechanics and the Physics of Growth, co-organized with Ganga Prasath (IITM) and @joelmarthelot.bsky.social (Aix-Marseille)! Fantastic start with a lecture on continuum elasticity by @abigailplummer.bsky.social (BU)

Had the pleasure of working with @mohannad-dardiry.bsky.social to rethink what it means to develop for life. Many thanks to @dev-journal.bsky.social! @embl.org #LifelongDevSI

Host-mediated niche construction of bacterial communities in an aquatic microecosystem Abstract. Microbes coordinate homeostasis in host-associated and environmental ecosystems alike, but the connectivity of these biomes is seldom considered.

Excited to share our new paper out in @isme-microbes.bsky.social. We asked if environmental microbial communities can be adaptively modulated by host species that transiently acquire their symbionts from the environment #SymbioSky #MicrobiomeSky
doi.org/10.1093/isme...

📣 New preprint! Stoked to share a fantastic collaboration with @campaslab.bsky.social!

We discover a unique mammalian mechanism for body axis elongation using mouse and human gastruloids, and confirm central findings in mouse embryos.

Check out the 🧵 👇

@mpi-cbg.de @poldresden.bsky.social

Preprint 🚨! B cells form localized patterns in the immune synapse when mature, allowing improved affinity discrimination. How? We suggest a new mechanism using dynamic active forces and feedback! Read more @ arxiv.org/abs/2510.18771. Great colab with Shenshen Wang, Tom Chou and Tony Wong (UCLA).

“Cellular Olympics” our catalog of freeky ultra fast cellular superhero’s is freely available “Ann Rev of microbiology”

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

This is a compilation of world’s fastest single cell organisms - enjoy this buffet of rare delightful protists with mind bending speeds. 🧪

Penn rejects White House proposal for special funding treatment With the decision, Penn becomes the third university to decline the offer.

🚨🚨🚨

And THREE stood up!

Penn has joined MIT & Brown in rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact.

When we join together and fight back, WE WIN!

No amount of federal bribery is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent.

LET’S GO!

#DefendHigherEd
@aaup-penn.bsky.social

MCDB Opens Search for Faculty | U-M LSA Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB) MCDB welcomes applications at the Assistant Professor level from outstanding biological scientists in all areas of physiology and neuroscience, spanning molecular, cellular, systems, and organismal le...

MCDB Assistant Professor Faculty Search. Please Repost!

Applications Due Oct 15th (TOMORROW!)

We welcome applications from all areas of physiology and neuroscience - spanning molecular, cellular, systems, and organismal levels.

More information can be found HERE:
lsa.umich.edu/mcdb/news-ev...

Headline from an article in Nature this week that states "Prizes must recognize machine contributions to discovery. The future of science will be written by humans and machines together. Awards should reflect that reality."

Lol the Nobels can't even acknowledge women's contribution to discovery. But sure let's acknowledge The Machines.

Ice Diatoms Glide at Record-Low Temperatures - Eos New observations reveal how microscopic organisms move through polar ice and illustrate how they may have evolved to thrive in extreme environments.

Life knows how to keep going - even if it’s freezing -15 degrees C 🥶 outside. AGU just covered our discovery of ultra resistant ice diatoms gliding into a world record! 🧪🔬Enjoy the story here:

eos.org/articles/ice...

Epithelial tension controls intestinal cell extrusion Cell extrusion is essential for homeostatic self-renewal of the intestinal epithelium. Extrusion is thought to be triggered by crowding-induced compression of cells at the intestinal villus tip. In th...

1/11 In @science.org: A new perspective on how our intestines renew. Cells are not “pushed out” by crowding or die from apoptosis. Instead, cells play a mechanical tug-of-war, where weaker cells extrude, reframing gut renewal as force-regulated. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Mechanical forces drive evolutionary change A small tissue fold present in fruit fly embryos buffers mechanical stresses and may have evolved in response to mechanical forces.

Dresden researchers @paveltomancak.bsky.social @bruvellu.bsky.social, Carl Modes, @cuencam15.bsky.social ‬ & colleagues published in @nature.com that a tissue fold in fruit fly embryos buffers mechanical stresses & may have evolved in response to mechanical forces. www.mpi-cbg.de/news-outreac...

Lab’s latest: (mouse) mums grow their guts during pregnancy and lactation: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Title page of the review article 'The Physics of Sensing and Decision-Making by Animal Groups' by Danielle L. Chase and Orit Peleg in Annual Review of Biophysics. Includes illustrations of collective behavior in honeybees: a diagram showing uncommitted scout bees transitioning through decision-making to choose between two nest sites; a honeybee on a honeycomb cell; a cluster of bees hanging from a branch; and a schematic of bees forming a layered cluster.

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Out today in Phys. Rev. Fluids, our 'Arrested development and traveling waves of active suspensions in nematic liquid crystals'. The bend instability in active suspensions pairs off against bending resistance in LCs to tell quite a story! 1/20

people.math.wisc.edu/~spagnolie/P...

I’m thrilled to share my first review about microbial ecology + mosquito-borne disease control! Bacteria block pathogen development in the mosquito gut, but which bacteria will produce long-lasting results in the field? Let’s think about colonization and persistence in the mosquito gut! (1/4)

Congrats Kirsty!

Publishing scientific papers is an obstacle course. There are many aspects to this but lengthy review times are one. That's why I am very excited about the new initiative @biologyopen.bsky.social, @biologists.bsky.social open access journal: Fast & Fair 1/n 🧪
journals.biologists.com/bio/pages/fa...

This was a fun exercise... reflecting on my accidental path into science, the questions that drive our lab @crick.ac.uk , and thoughts on building a more inclusive scientific community. Grateful for the opportunity @focalplane.bsky.social and Subhajit .

Have you ever thought about inflating tissues?
Or maybe quickly deflating those inflated tissues?

New #EpithelialMechanics pre-print: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
🧵 with pressure control, multiscale buckling, controlled wrinkling

Our two sister papers on combinatorial metamaterials published today in @physrevresearch.bsky.social, a result of a fantastic SKCM2 collaboration with Chaviva Sirote-Katz at Tel Aviv and Tamás Kálmán at Tokyo shokef.tau.ac.il

Emergence of cellular nematic order is a conserved feature of gastrulation in animal embryos Nature Communications - The morphogenetic events that occur during gastrulation involve dramatic cell- and tissue-level changes. Here they show that propagation of nematic order, leading to...

Scientific collaborations come in many flavors & are fun because they expose you to new areas of science. That was definitely the case for this paper, out today. We were definitely in the passenger seat but it was fun to go along for the ride 1/n
rdcu.be/euiZB.

On Sticks, Karats, and Charades: The Structural Dismantling of American Science The displacement of NSF employees from their headquarters opens a new front in the dismantling of American leadership in science.

good take on the current state of the State attack on scientific infrastructure by @joshuasweitz.bsky.social

joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/on-sticks-...

Chloroplast acquisition without the gene transfer in kleptoplastic sea slugs, Plakobranchus ocellatus The newly opened genome of a kleptoplastic mollusk, Plakobranchus ocellatus, indicated that sequestered plastids retain their activity within the animal cell without horizontal algal gene transfer to ...

You hadn’t heard of kleptoplasty before? It is a pretty amazing phenomenon indeed. I was lucky to learn about it when this paper came to @elife.bsky.social a few years ago: elifesciences.org/articles/60176

500-million-year-old fossils reveal how the starfish got its arms | Natural History Museum How echinoderms evolved such an unusual shape has long troubled biologists.

Great write-up on our paper by @joshlukedavis.com @nhm-london.bsky.social www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

Flight simulator for moths reveals they navigate by starlight Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 18 June 2025

This week on the Nature Podcast 🔊 Flight simulator for moths reveals they navigate by starlight

https://go.nature.com/461KE6E

Woah! Such an important study published in Nature today! Quick thread with some of their key figures!
🧵