Abbas Zaki

Yesterday at the "Planetary #CellBiology" session of #CellBio2025, chaired by Amy Gladfelter, we explored how cell and #MolecularBiology discoveries connect to planetary health, informed by voices from science, education and funding. 🧪 American Society for Cell Biology

This would be such a fun journal to read 🙂‍↕️

One of these, thiovolum imperiosus is fascinating:
- multiple copies of their genome but they’re nearly identical
- almost everything in the cell is in a thin layer of peripheral cytoplasm and the middle is a large compartment that organizes the cell together with membrane invaginations

Crazy stats included:
- just 5% of bacteria account of 90% of 🦠 pubs
- >90% of 🦠 remain uncultured
- some bacteria can grow to be 20,000 um which is WILD on its own but
- this isn’t even uncommon bc multiple species of HUGE bacteria (>50 um) exist

Couldn’t stay away from the weird lil cells at extremes though and went back to @vollandlab.bsky.social talk and it did not disappoint

More impressively, vitamin B3 supplementation even rescued KO mice showing this is a very cool platform to identify possible translational therapies with real effects!

Probably overusing the word but this was honestly so elegant! The idea that you can do a CRISPR screen and add vitamins to see which monogenic diseases might be treatable with vitamins is just *chef’s kiss* 👌🏽

Another really cool talk I had the pleasure of catching in the “Adapating Cellular Machines to Cellular Context” session was by @ishahjain.bsky.social showcasing a new way of fighting metabolic disorders

Really neat framework for how ELVAs store aggregates and later degrade when they mature to eggs and how that might help reduce metabolic demands to keep ELVAs in a constant degradative state

But really neat how the lysosome is getting a break from its rep as the 🗑️ of the cell and even crazier how ELVAs can be 10s of microns but still behave liquid-like and not depend on microtubules

Honestly was just struck by how huge (100 um 🤯) oocytes can be and what that means for coordinating cargo trafficking at that scale

So many amazing talks at day 1 of #cellbio2025 was absolutely torn between sessions but managed to catch @gzaffagnini.bsky.social discussing how oocytes maintain proteostasis with endolysosomal vesicular assemblies (ELVAs)

Absolutely wild that single celled organisms can coordinate such complex interactions 🤯

Even more interestingly though, stentors oscillate between partners instead of sticking with one buddy. Since flow velocity might be higher for one stentor than another, this might help prevent suboptimal pairings by spreading interactions to multiple partners aka “eating family style”

Super elegant use of particle image velocimetry to show stentors together generate almost 2x faster flow towards each to improve feeding

Really loved the comparison to actin self-assembly but with ridiculously large (250 um 😱) cells

Switching gears to how cells work together, @sshekhr.bsky.social gave a beautiful talk on stentors and how hydrodynamics influence cooperativity 🌀

Also just cool to be reminded that in addition to being fun lil guys, fungi interactions matter to better develop anti-fungals and secondary metabolites

Next up @mjhays.bsky.social talked about killer yeast that secrete toxins to kill neighboring cells ☠️ Really elegant experiments comparing coevolution vs asymmetric evolution to show it’s really coevolution driving resistance!

Also so cool that 1 out of 3 cells in the 🌊 are archaea 🤯

Had no clue archaea could fuse lipid bilayers to make membrane spanning monolayers or methylate to adapt to ❄️ temps (by archaea standards anyway)

Just bonkers cool stuff at #cellbio2025 “Cells at the Extremes” session starting with Andy Garcia giving a great talk on how archaea modify their membranes to survive extreme habitats 🌡️

Absolutely wild that single celled organisms can coordinate such complex interactions 🤯

Even more interestingly though, stentors oscillate between partners instead of sticking with one buddy. Since flow velocity might be higher for one stentor than another, this might help prevent suboptimal pairings by spreading interactions to multiple partners aka “eating family style”

Super elegant use of particle image velocimetry to show stentors together generate almost 2x faster flow towards each to improve feeding

Really loved the comparison to actin self-assembly but with ridiculously large (250 um 😱) cells

Switching gears to how cells work together, @sshekhr.bsky.social gave a beautiful talk on stentors and how hydrodynamics influence cooperativity 🌀

Also just cool to be reminded that in addition to being fun lil guys, fungi interactions matter to better develop anti-fungals and secondary metabolites

Next up Michelle Hays talked about killer yeast that secrete toxins to kill neighboring cells ☠️ Really elegant experiments comparing coevolution vs asymmetric evolution to show it’s really coevolution driving resistance!

Also so cool that 1 out of 3 cells in the 🌊 are archaea 🤯