Lowe Lab

scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu. Registration is open for the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology meeting AUGUST 2026. PLEASE SHARE.

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

Bittersweet Tahoe retreat with the lab - we said goodbye to Laurent @laurentformery.bsky.social as he starts his new lab www.echinox.org @biom-banyuls.bsky.social. He made his indelible mark in our lab. Very excited to watch new discoveries from his own lab. He will always be LoweLab for us.

Check out the invited speakers for the Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meetings next summer. It is going to be a great meeting. Registration and Abstract submission will be live early 2026.

Save the date for the next Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting next summer.

Ectopic head regeneration after nervous system ablation in a sea anemone Via genetic ablation of neurons, Mazloumi Gavgani et al. show that the nervous system is essential for defining axial polarity during whole-body regeneration in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis.

Our paper on the role of neurons in Nematostella head regeneration is now out at @currentbiology.bsky.social Big thank you to all collaborators, it was a pleasure!

Ectopic head regeneration after nervous system ablation in a sea anemone: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Cover of book titled The Tree of Life: solving science's greatest puzzle.

My book 'The Tree of Life' is published in the USA and Canada today.

Available as book, on kindle and as audio.

I would be really grateful for reposts.

www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So...
www.amazon.ca/Tree-Life-So...

Great collaboration between @paulbump.bsky.social and @planaria1.bsky.social lab. Some really surprising findings for cell type turnover during hemichordate metamorphosis.

you are on top of hemichordate preprints - its only been online for a hour !

Want to be on the ground floor for exciting new insights into echinoderm body plan and life history evolution? Apply to this lab!!! Laurent Formery is just getting going and will be making key insights in this space. Banyuls is beautiful and has a great team working in deuterostome development.

so glad this paper is still resonating with people. We are very proud of it. I like the drawing.

Two parallel lineage-committed progenitors contribute to the developing brain The hindbrain is a life-sustaining brain region. In one model, a common neural progenitor generates all brain regions. Here our studies of mouse embryos and human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) suppor...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Check out this new manuscript from Loh Lab at Stanford on the developmental origins of the vertebrate CNS.

congrats Kristen - surprised it has taken this long !! You are and have always been an amazing scientist.

I’d like to see that if you figure out where u saw it.

Inspired by visits to Woods Hole @mblscience.bsky.social and Roscoff, we hope to welcome folks in #SunnyBergen to foster exchange and spark discoveries in Marine Life Sciences.

This is one of the best parts of the job - seeing talented, hard-working people being recognized and given the opportunity to start their own groups. Laurent is just getting started on echinoderms.... talented ambitious people on the lookout for a position in a great new lab.... stay tuned.

I really love my new colleague at Hopkins, here shown in her element on the last day of her new imaging mini course at Hopkins. Vanessa Barone is such an amazing addition to the faculty in Biology and Hopkins

Check out our latest work‼️Fantastic study with really cool data and findings led by @allancarbal.bsky.social in collaborarion with Stephan’s lab. The one and many ways of getting a belly…

Want a growing and awesome community studying fundamentals in developmental and cell biology using emerging marine models. Apply for this postdoc.

Antero-posterior patterning in the brittle star Amphipholis squamata and the evolution of echinoderm body plans - EvoDevo Although the adult pentaradial body plan of echinoderms evolved from a bilateral ancestor, identifying axial homologies between the morphologically divergent echinoderms and their bilaterian relatives...

evodevojournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Excellent developmental biology symposium at Hopkins today organized by Vanessa Barone. Guest speaker Jake Warner with Stanford and Biohub faculty. Really great talks and discussion.

@endofthepier.bsky.social I just saw this review of your new book from Eric Idle. I would retire - doesn't get better than that.

My first view of the finished book.

The Tree of Life. #treeoflife @johnmurrays.bsky.social.

Out 24th April. Can preorder now from all good bookshops.

And please feel free to Repost!!

(Sound up to hear me make a weird high pitched wookie growl.)

Glad I know you to be a delightful human......., that picture has the potential to scare children.

clearly they have the wrong model of starfish body plan organization 😜

Another beautiful paper from @laurentformery.bsky.social . This species, A.squamata, is a viviparous brooder - juveniles year round. Near and dear to my heart as I worked on it for my thesis. Laurent took it to another level. First installment of a new series of papers he is working on.

A Pre-Bilaterian Origin of Phototransduction Genes and Photoreceptor Cells The evolution of vision is a major novelty in animals, playing a fundamental role in developing complex behaviours. Vision initiates with a light-triggered phototransduction cascade occurring in photo...

How did vision evolve? In our latest study, we show that:
Key phototransduction genes originated in the metazoan stem group
A conserved transcriptional program in putative PRCs from ctenophores to mammals www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How a Canadian scientist and a venomous lizard helped pave the way for Ozempic - National | Globalnews.ca In 1984, Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist from the University of Toronto, discovered a hormone that helped pave the way for popular diabetes drugs such as Ozempic.

This is the most relevant article to NIH and research cuts I’ve seen.

Imagine if this was today , how many people would be saying “Why are we studying Gila Monsters and their impact on diabetes ? That’s wasted money !”

globalnews.ca/news/9793403...

your preprint looks fascinating.

Delighted to open up our new imaging center at Hopkins. This is part of an initiative supported by Stanford Humanities and Sciences to leverage marine biodiversity for biological insights.