Alison Kickuth

Our call for PhD students within our International Max Planck Research School for Cell, Developmental and Systems Biology is open! Apply until October 28th. We are looking forward hearing from you! imprs.mpi-cbg.de

What a pleasure to collaborate with Laura #Schaedel and her team at @uni-saarland.de to study #microtubule damage and repair under mechanical load.

Mechanical forces drive evolutionary change A small tissue fold present in fruit fly embryos buffers mechanical stresses and may have evolved in response to mechanical forces.

Dresden researchers @paveltomancak.bsky.social @bruvellu.bsky.social, Carl Modes, @cuencam15.bsky.social ‬ & colleagues published in @nature.com that a tissue fold in fruit fly embryos buffers mechanical stresses & may have evolved in response to mechanical forces. www.mpi-cbg.de/news-outreac...

Patrick's paper is finally out, a label-free method to measure the composition of multicomponent biomolecular condensates!

Just started our @bcube-tud.bsky.social - organized Engineering Life 2025 #25EngLife conference in #Dresden! Excited to have everybody around!

The maturation process of oocytes remains paused for several years. Researchers from #UniKonstanz and @uni-goettingen.de have now found out which protein ensures this state is maintained over such a long period. Full story: https://t1p.de/nvejp

Very happy that the first article from my postdoc work in the Tomancak lab is now published @PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/.... We studied the self-organization of actin in aggregates made from Hydra cells. Thread below (1/9)

Thrilled to share our work using live imaging to understand how Epiblast (future embryo proper) and Primitive Endoderm (future extraembryonic tissues) cell fates segregate in the preimplantation mouse embryo. Gargantuan effort led by amazing @rpkimyip.bsky.social, David Denberg and Denis Faerberg!

Great news, congrats! 🥳

A picture of 3 rows of people on steps at the MRC LMB. From left to right - top row: Akaash, Vic, Lara - Middle row: Kerrie, Manu, Paddy - bottom row: Meg and Julie

🚨 JOB ALERT 🚨
We're hiring a Research Assistant – no PhD needed!
Join us to explore the molecular mechanisms of receptor sorting in endosomes.
Experience in protein expression/purification, cloning & cell culture desired 🧫🔬
Apply now 👉 www.nature.com/naturecareer...

#STEMCareers #ResearchJobs

I successfully defended my PhD thesis this week! Thank you @brugueslab.bsky.social, @poldresden.bsky.social and @mpi-cbg.de for the great time over the last years!

Congratulations Vinca!!

We may not have really squared the circle — but we came close! 😉 In our @NaturePhysics paper w/ @fakhrilab.bsky.social, light-triggered membrane excitability enables programmable shapes — a step toward engineering living matter.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#biophysics #syntheticcell #softmatter

I am very happy to share that my work on active deformations of lipid vesicles is finally out in Nature Physics. A nicer thread+movies coming soon, in the meantime:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thx to Andreas, Hammad, Dmitry, Gerhard @laynefrechette.bsky.social and everybody else who contributed!

Measuring and manipulating mechanical forces during development - Nature Cell Biology This Review discusses the recent advances in experimental approaches to interrogate the mechanical forces that mediate tissue deformations during development, highlighting the insights afforded at bot...

Happy to share our review on methodology for measuring and manipulating mechanical forces with specific focus on developmental biology! Congrats to authors @clemvilleneuve.bsky.social @mccreery.bsky.social and hats off to the community for developing awesome tools www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The cell cycle oscillator and spindle length set the speed of chromosome separation in Drosophila embryos Xu et al. investigate how the speed of chromosome separation is regulated during the cleavage divisions of the Drosophila blastoderm. They find that spindle length and the cell cycle oscillator jointly control the velocity of chromosome movement in anaphase.

Yitong's paper is now out in Current Biology. In this paper, we investigated what sets the speed of chromosome separation in anaphase and found that it is mainly set by the dynamics of the cell cycle oscillator. This was a fun collaboration with @brugueslab.bsky.social
www.cell.com/current-biol...

We made a photoswitchable HaloTag (psHaloTag), which can reversibly turn-on fluorogenic dyes upon illumination 💡. Congrats to Franzi, Bego and all co-authors, check out our preprint below 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cell-cell communication controls the timing of gastruloid symmetry-breaking In the embryo, morphogenetic signals instruct regional patterning thereby defining the body axes of the future animal. Remarkably, in the absence of such signals, collections of pluripotent stem cells...

Really happy to share with you my last work from my time in @embl.org with the @viktri08.bsky.social group. We studied the dynamics of cell fate transition in gastruloids and found that cells communicate with each other to control the timing of symmetry breaking. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cell-cell communication controls the timing of gastruloid symmetry-breaking https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.16.628776v1

Bovyn, M. J., & Haas, P. A. (2024). Shaping epithelial lumina under pressure. Biochemical Society transactions, 52(1), 331–342. #EpithelialMechanicsReview
https://portlandpress.com/biochemsoctrans/article/52/1/331/234112/Shaping-epithelial-lumina-under-pressure

Congratulations! 🎉

Thank you! 👋