kenzo ivanovitch

Excited to share our latest work with @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social .

A global #cis-regulatory temporal program guides how spatial cues are interpreted in neural progenitors. We show how #space and #time can be integrated to generate cell type diversity in the #spinalcord.

Congrats to all authors.

This isn't a coincidence, IMO. The fly community is generally super rigorous - because there are so many tools and techniques available, people expect you to really nail things in order to get published (and keep getting funded)

Gastruloid patterning reflects division of labor among biased stem cell clones Embryonic development typically requires precise coordination among cells to achieve reproducible outcomes, leading to the assumption that cellular heterogeneity must be minimized or buffered against....

[0/8] Stoked to share our work with @arjunraj.bsky.social on tissue organization in the gastruloid. We use lineage tracing and spatial transcriptomics to show that diversity among stem cell clones promotes, rather than hinders, gastruloid development: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

MRC Postdoctoral Research Scientists x 5 - MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences Applications are now open for up to five postdoctoral positions in the area of developmental epigenetics.

Interested in developmental epigenetics? So are we! Apply now to join us for your postdoc!

Multiple positions across multiple groups @mrc-lms.bsky.social

Projects spanning germline demethylation, gene regulation, genome architecture in development & disease 👇👇

lms.mrc.ac.uk/work/vacanci...

We've just been awarded a grant to study the cellular basis of regeneration – to track the progenitors of sensory organs in the context of leg regeneration, in our favourite crustacean tinyurl.com/parhyale, based on live imaging and cell tracking. The project involves some cool collaborations... 1/3

Want to hear more about bioimaging and image analysis at UCL? Follow @biig-ucl.bsky.social
This is a wonderful community for those bioimaging enthusiasts!

Embryonic CX3CR1+ cells constitute a multipotent epiblast-derived progenitor population that contributes not only to the formation of tissue-resident macrophages, but also of cardiomyocytes and heart endothelial cells
Young-sup Yoon and coworkers
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

This cover highlights the article Early coordination of cell migration and cardiac fate determination during mammalian gastrulation by Shayma Abukar, Kenzo Ivanovitch and colleagues. Using long-term live imaging of whole mouse embryos with light-sheet microscopy, this study tracks single cells to map how mesodermal cells coordinate their migration and fate decisions during gastrulation to drive early heart formation. The cover image shows the cardiac crescent (blue) and a late T/Bra-lineage-positive mesodermal subpopulation (red) in a DAPI-stained E7.5 mouse embryo (white). The image illustrates that late mesodermal cells contributing to the atria do not populate the cardiac crescent. Scientific image by Kenzo Ivanovitch

Issue 12:
Commentary: in vivo metabolomics in the cancer clinic
Review: oxygen-sulfur interdependence
ADP-ribosylation in M.tuberculosis
Microprotein promoting BAT thermogenesis
Cover by @kenzoivanovitch.bsky.social and colleagues
www.embopress.org/toc/14602075...

Save the date! March 23-26 will be the dates for our 2026 @bsdb.bsky.social annual meeting: Molecules to Morphogenesis!

Excited to reveal more details soon!

Want to attend with a reduced rate, and have access to conference/travel grants for other meetings too? Don't forget to join the BSDB :)

Feto-placental blood vessel development Summary: This Review contains an overview of placental vascular development and pathologies in mice and humans and highlights key remaining questions in the field.

Very happy to share I've written a review on placental vascular formation in mice and humans, now published in @dev-journal.bsky.social.

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

@idrm.ox.ac.uk Funded by the @thebhf.bsky.social

Beautiful work from @sagnera.bsky.social & co on how spinal neurons diversify

A temporal TF clock in spinal neurons, sequentially specifying different motor and sensory neuron subtypes during development

A shared molecular timer driving cellular diversity

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

congratulations! @shayma-a.bsky.social @yen-network.bsky.social

Graded mesoderm assembly governs cell fate and morphogenesis of the early mammalian heart - PubMed Using four-dimensional whole-embryo light sheet imaging with improved and accessible computational tools, we longitudinally reconstruct early murine cardiac development at single-cell resolution. Nasc...

Not first time thank you: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36736300/

Researchers @uclpophealthsci.bsky.social and @crick.ac.uk, led by Dr @kenzoivanovitch.bsky.social & Shayma Abukar, have, for the first time, identified the origin of cardiac cells using 3D images of a heart forming in real-time, inside a living mouse embryo www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/ma...

Moment of heart’s formation captured in images for first time Time-lapse footage reveals cardiac cells in a mouse embryo begin to organise themselves during early development

Featured in The Guardian! www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

We’re excited to share the first publication from our lab, now out in @EMBOPress! @shayma-a.bsky.social @ucl.ac.uk
Using live imaging in the mouse embryo, we tracked how heart progenitors migrate and assemble into the heart tube.

Congratulations!

Practical recommendations for developing software for life science applications ABSTRACT. Developing user-friendly image analysis software is essential for advancing biological and life science research. However, the interdisciplinary gap between software developers and life scie...

Fresh from the press! @lankylaste.bsky.social, @guijacquemet.bsky.social and I put together a practical guide on how to develop software for life science applications.

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

We’re hiring a new research fellow. Come join us in London to study glial cells in the ageing retina using killifish as a model. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Yes!

In Praise of Peer Review

As an Editor of the journal Development, I often hear complaints about peer review. We all know the problems - from lengthy review times to requests for seemingly unnecessary experiments. I agree with many of these complaints. Katherine Brown (Executive Editor of…

Constructive Critics: Development's approach to peer review We're all familiar with complaints about peer review. Some think it's biased – editors (especially from ‘those’ journals) seem to have too much power to decide what gets published. It can be opaque – ...

New @dev-journal.bsky.social editorial

We know we have high standards - but we're committed to making publishing with us constructive

From clear revision guidance to limitations sections & transparent peer review, we're here to help you share your science

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Using #gastruloids F. Lescroart and colleagues explore the origins of the most complex organ in our body, the #heart. Very good start of unravelling an amazing process in which an organ is being designed and redesigned at the same time it functions
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

5/ We’d like to thank the community for constructive feedback; it’s been invaluable in refining and improving our analysis!

Live-imaging reveals Coordinated Cell Migration and Cardiac Fate Determination during Mammalian Gastrulation. Heart development involves the specification of cardiac progenitors at distinct stages and locations. Using live-imaging of mouse embryos between gastrulation and heart tube formation, we tracked indi...

4/ This work highlights how coordinated migration and fate determination shape the heart tube. See the full updated study:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

3/ Descendants of bipotent progenitors showed greater dispersion and diverse trajectories within the anterior mesoderm, unlike the more directed migration of unipotent progenitors.

2/ Key findings:

Early unipotent progenitors commit to restricted regions like the left ventricle myocardium.

Bipotent progenitors exist but rapidly restrict into unique cardiac fates during migration.

1/ We tracked cardiac mesodermal lineages and migration paths over up to 40 hours, revealing how cells transition from gastrulation to heart tube formation.

We would like to share an update of our live analysis of heart development in mouse embryos!

@shayma-a.bsky.social @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Second (BBSRC Yorkshire Bioscience DTP-funded) PhD project available in our lab (jointly with
@christoseland.bsky.social) examining how biomechanical cues crosstalk with signals to influence cell fate decisions during hESC differentiation. More details here: thenode.biologists.com/jobs/funded-...