sergey epi

Plasma membrane folding enables constant surface area-to-volume ratio in growing mammalian cells Cell surface area-to-volume ratio (SA/V) can limit cell functions. SA/V is believed to decrease as cells grow larger, but a new study by Wu et al. shows that mammalian cells maintain near-constant SA/...

excessive cell 'skin' isn't a norm, but there's a twist: it's a *necessity*! The more folds a big cell's membrane has, the better for its surface-to-volume ratio: www.cell.com/current-biol... (in mammals, at least)

кросева

A light-hearted cartoon image of two gerbils having a conversation in grassland with rolling hills behind. The gerbil on the left says, 'I know I'm never going to win any medals for my jumping. Long hind legs just isn't enough'. The gerbil on the right responds, 'But you're wrong! Apparently long shins could propel your leaps into the super league'. The image is by Francesca Luisi.

Gerbils don't excel at any particular manoeuvre, but gerbils with long shins tend to be better jumpers while gerbils with long thighs are more manoeuvrable. They don't prioritise one manoeuvre at the expense of another 1/2🧵 @brown-ibes.bsky.social
journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Sea anemones track the suns position?! 🤯 So thrilled to share our paper is finally published in @J_Exp_Biol! 🎉
Congrats to my student leads Eliska Lintnerova and Callum Shawn.
Check it out: journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

В Россоши обычно вроде долго поезда стоят? Ну, мне такие попадаются постоянно

Fluorescence microscope image showing a protein that goes to only one flagellum

The world is full of crazy and sad news, but here is a protein that localizes to only one of the two flagella

Thank God it seems that all cephalopods possess exactly this sex determination system, and their Z chromosomes have the same origin. For me, it's a striking contrast to, like, mammalian sex chromosomes, where you have the boring XY in therians but bloody hell in monotremes.

Cephalopod sex determination and its ancient evolutionary origin Coffing et al. assemble a chromosome-level octopus genome assembly, revealing that the female octopus has just one sex chromosome (ZO karyotype), and males have two (ZZ karyotype). They conduct genomi...

Осьминоги зиганули (sorry don't know how to properly translate this russian meme phrase into English). Now thanks to this report in Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol... we know that cephalopods have Z sex chromosomes, and the females have Z0 genotype, while males have ZZ genotype.

Our beloved Tula Central Park!

Присоединяюсь к Юле!

While Simon Baron-Cohen argues that no other species except Homo sapiens is able to invent anything (see his 'Pattern Seekers' book), Goffin's cockatoos successfully invent soaking rusk in water before eating it.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

thar's not true

just imagine: you are a prehistoric hyena's faecal bolus soon to become a source of wooly rhinoceros mitochondrial DNA, and consequently the first European wooly rhinoceros mitogenome ever
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Study reveals how cultural factors influence chess move choice A new Stanford study that used population and statistical models to analyze 3.45 million chess games by master players reveals how cultural biases can influence

my work on cultural evolution and transmission biases in chess is out today in Proceedings B!

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

humsci.stanford.edu/feature/stud...

is not that new to me because it was popular among some MSU Biology department staff in 2010s. Anyway, this paper is a great reminder that 'simple' nervous systems are not THAT simple, and not only common research objects have cool features that were discovered / thoroughly researched in them. (2/2)

www.cell.com/current-biol...
What interests me here is that our simple textbook 'diffuse' Hydra nervous system in fact has distinct neuronal (sub)populations doing different things. Surprisingly, the idea that the microbiota influences host's neuronal activity via glutamate and the like (1/2)

oh, how come I forgot cellular/molecular/evolutionary neurobiology and behaviorl ecology papers!

Guess here I will collect links to scientific papers that interest me, and they would mostly be bizarre/rodent-related/plant-related/lgbtq-related. God please give me time and strength to at least minimally cover those publications that I like the most.