Laurent Formery

Thanks Bruno!

This looks fabulous! Congrats all!

What a day for #ctenophores!!
Congrats @kei-jokura.bsky.social @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social @annaferraioli.bsky.social @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy et al !!! 🥳🥳

Congrats Pedro!! 🥳🥳

Thank you Chris 🥹❤️ It takes a great and inspiring mentor to get there!!

I am honored and beyond happy to share that I have been awarded an @inserm.fr #ATIP-Avenir fellowship to start my own lab to study body plan evolution in #echinoderms 🤩

Stay tuned for more exciting updates coming soon!!

My first steps into paleontology!! 😀
Big thanks to @imranrahman.bsky.social for having me on this cool project to look at some fascinating echinoderm fossils ⭐

Thanks Eve 😊

Congrats!! Can’t wait to read this 🤩🪱

Our brittle star patterning study is now out at EvoDevo! 🥳
doi.org/10.1186/s132...

@lowelab.bsky.social

+ Bonus baby geese 🐣🐤

Birdwatching from my desk at Hopkins Marine Station (instead of working on my paper's revisions 🥹 🥲)
#DoomscrollingBreak

Awesome data! Congrats Periklis 🤩

It was really fun to work with such a weird and fascinating animal as Amphipholis squamata! Thanks to everybody involved in this project 😀

This confirms that echinoderms are mostly head-like animals from an ectoderm patterning perspective, and helps us reconstruct axial evolution across echinoderm body plans ⭐

More importantly, we looked at the expression of 21 AP patterning genes at different juvenile timepoints, and found that their expression is consistent with the model that we described previously in sea stars, albeit with modifications that we attribute to the derived brittle star morphology

Among other things, we've learned that working with brittle star samples can be terrifying at times 😱

If you like snowflakes, check our new preprint about axial patterning in brittle stars ⭐

We looked at the expression of anteroposterior patterning genes in Amphipholis squamata juveniles, and compared it with existing data from other classes

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

@lowelab.bsky.social

Time to recycle this xmas brittle star HCR ⭐
Happy holidays all!! ❄️🎁🎄

Stay tuned for some more brittle star data coming soon 😎

#fluorescence #microscopy #HCR #holidays #imaging

Calcein staining showing the skeleton on the aboral side of a juvenile sea star (Patiria miniata)
Everything looks better with a rainbow LUT 🌈😊
#microscopy #echinoderms #fluorescence

Shamelessly taking advantage of the bluesky migration to share again some of my favorite echinoderm pics 😀🤩

🔽 Acetylated tubulin (nerves and cilia) and phalloidin (muscles) stains in a juvenile sea urchin (Paracentrotus lividus) just after metamorphosis ⭐

So happy to see this picture of the nervous system in a transparent Henricia sea star selected as an image of distinction by @NikonSmallWorld !! 😎

It was imaged using the see-star clearing protocol developped with @Nat Clarke
⬇️Check the paper here:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

oh I would love to! thanks

Yes that's exactly what happens in sea cucumbers and sea urchins! From a molecular point of view, that wild processus is still a complete black box. We have just investigated how the ectoderm is patterned once the pentaradial symmetry is already established by the mesoderm

Thanks! I will definitely advertise bluesky when i get a couple of invites to share

omg thank you so much 🤗

Our study investigating the hidden molecular anatomy of sea stars is now published!! 🥳🥳🥳

We looked at a long standing zoological problem: how to compare the pentaradial symmetry of echinoderms with the bilateral symmetry of their relatives?

Check what we found here 🔽
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hello free world :)