GW Gant Luxton

Check out our new paper!

iCLAP: an innovative method for integrable codetection
of low-abundance antigens with highplex
immunostaining

Read more about iCLAP here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🍅🍅 Love this! I think we're all getting at the same thing from different angles, which is what makes it fun. Thanks for sharing, @simonereber.bsky.social!

Don’t forget to register for the C. elegans topic meeting June 10-14 in Madison, WI. Early bird registration deadline this Friday 2/27! uwmadison.eventsair.com/mapsdev26/

So many thanks to co-first authors Hongyan Hao, @xiangyiding.bsky.social, and Daniel Elnatan! And to our funders at NIH/NIGMS and @alleninstitute.org! #mechanobiology #frontierscience #Celegans

The Biophysical World Inside a Jam-Packed Cell | Quanta Magazine Innovations in imaging and genetic engineering are coming together to probe the biophysics of cytoplasm inside living animals.

New in @quantamagazine.bsky.social: the science of cytoplasmic crowding. From Liam Holt & Simone Reber's work to our discovery that in vivo cytoplasm is 50x more crowded than cultured cells. Thanks @danstarrucdavis.bsky.social & @gabepopkin.bsky.social! www.quantamagazine.org/the-biophysi...

The Biophysical World Inside a Jam-Packed Cell | Quanta Magazine Innovations in imaging and genetic engineering are coming together to probe the biophysics of cytoplasm inside living animals.

Forget the calm, spacious cells from your biology textbook. Inside a living cell, it’s less “tidy factory” and more “midnight nightclub and the cytoplasm of worm cells is thick as strawberry jam.

Congrats, @gwgl.bsky.social!

www.quantamagazine.org/the-biophysi...

Cell Bio 2023-An ASCB|EMBO Meeting Network, learn, and collaborate with top cell biologists from around the globe.

The call for session proposals for Cell Bio 2026 is open. ASCB gives priority to organizers who haven't run a session in the last two years, and they encourage trainees to submit with an experienced co-chair. Deadline: Feb 22. @ascbiology.bsky.social www.ascb.org/cellbio2026/...

TaoChongBao: A Large-Scale Caenorhabditis elegans Mutagenesis and Missense Variant Database Bridging Worm and Human Genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.03.692224v1

Endoplasmic reticulum disruption stimulates nuclear membrane mechanotransduction - Nature Cell Biology Shen, Gelashvili and Niethammer developed an inner nuclear membrane tension sensor and demonstrated that ER–nuclear membrane contiguity acts as a mechanical buffer.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So excited to post my first official #zebrafish paper in my new gig at UC Berkeley with my amazing co-authors @swinburnelab.bsky.social @alinetschanz.bsky.social

The TL;DR is that monomeric StayGolds are game changers for in vivo imaging in zebrafish 1/7

micropublication.org/journals/bio...

WormTagDB: A Systematic Survey of Endogenously Tagged Proteins in C. elegans and Roadmap Towards the Tagged Proteome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.02.691955v1

Grateful to be featured in Nature Methods discussing how @danstarrucdavis.bsky.social and I run the joint Starr-Luxton Lab @ucdavis.bsky.social together. Thanks to Vivien Marx for the thoughtful interview - she really captured what makes this model work. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Medicine Nobel goes to three researchers who identified immune system’s security guards Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi discovered regulatory T cells that prevent autoimmune disease

This year’s #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists for discovering how the immune system distinguishes friend from foe. https://scim.ag/3Wt5rdi

Medicine Nobel goes to scientists who revealed secrets of immune system ‘regulation’ Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi discovered cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists for discovering a class of immune cells that help to prevent the body from attacking its own tissues

go.nature.com/48QDdAJ

Write your program officer and grants management official TODAY and thank them! It takes 30 seconds and its really appreciated. The only reason they're remotely this close is because those folks are working 60 hour weeks under immense pressure

🎉Check out our new preprint!! 🧬We found that lamin mutations in muscular dystrophy don’t just affect the nucleus — they disrupt a nucleolar–ribosomal axis that reorganizes the entire cytoplasm.
Very grateful to @danstarrucdavis.bsky.social, @gwgl.bsky.social and our lab for collaboration & support!

Therapeutic implications: target ribosome production pathways, not just nuclear proteins.
@danstarrucdavis.bsky.social (6/6)
#CellBiology #MuscularDystrophy #FrontierScience

This changes how we think about laminopathies. It's not just nuclear mechanics or gene regulation - it's fundamental cellular biophysics being rewired by ribosome depletion. (5/6)

Lamin mutations → disrupted nucleolus → fewer ribosomes → altered cytoplasmic crowding → cellular chaos
We call this the "nucleolar-ribosomal axis" and it explains the widespread cellular defects in EDMD. (4/6)

Using nanoparticle tracking in living C. elegans, we discovered that lamin mutations do not just break nuclear mechanics, they trigger a cascade that reorganizes the entire cytoplasm. (3/6)

Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy is caused by mutations in nuclear proteins (lamins/emerin). But patients show problems way beyond the nucleus: misplaced organelles, disrupted cell structure, etc. Current models couldn't fully explain this. (2/6)

🧬 NEW Starr-Luxton Lab PREPRINT: Our 🌠grad student
@XiangyiDing
figured out why muscular dystrophy mutations cause such widespread cellular chaos. The answer wasn't what we expected - and it changes how we think about the disease. Thread🧵 (1/6). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Centrosomes might look tough, but they are actually big softies - see the latest work from the Dammermann lab now on BioRxiv:

Congrats to @xiangyiding.bsky.social et al. on their new study on the intense cellular dance happening in worm cells! 🕺

Dive into the #FrontierScience of organelle crowd control. 👇

Many thanks to Liana Wait for this fabulous write up!

Worms Reveal Just How Cramped Cells Really Are In a new study published in Science Advances on September 10, a team of UC Davis researchers tracked the movement of fluorescent particles inside the cells of microscopic worms, providing unprecedente...

biology.ucdavis.edu/news/worms-r...

🧬Want the full story of our paper without the science jargon? Our @ucdavis.bsky.social department broke down our "cells are crowded AND constrained" findings in plain English! Perfect explanation of why worm cells are nothing like cultured cells 🪱🌠

Congrats to first authors
@xiangyiding.bsky.social, Hongyan Hao, and Daniel Elnatan! This was a fantastic collaboration with
Liam Holt at NYU and the Starr
@danstarrucdavis.bsky.social
-Luxton lab. Many thanks to
@alleninstitute.org nstitute
and @NIGMS for funding this work. #Frontierscience

Giant KASH proteins and ribosomes establish distinct cytoplasmic biophysical properties in vivo Living tissues maintain unique intracellular biophysical properties under the control of cytoplasmic constraints and crowding.

🧬BREAKING!🪱Plot twist: Cells aren't meditation pools, they're overcrowded concerts with VIP ropes everywhere! Our
study reveals worm cells are insanely crowded AND compartmentalized. Ribosomes = packing peanuts, ANC-1 = the bouncer!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

@danstarrucdavis.bsky.social @ucdavis.bsky.social