Justin Crocker

Great meeting and great people, thanks again @biologists.bsky.social 😀!!!

Participants of the meeting posing on a staircase looking fantastic.

Thanks to co-authors Charles C. Bell, Brendan R. Camellato,
M. Joaquina Delás, Daniel M. Ibrahim, and @michaeltmont.bsky.social
And also to all the participants of the 2024🤨 Company of Biologists meeting that inspired this.

Society for Developmental Biology 85th Annual Meeting poster Compilation of images of research organisms from the Marine Biological Laboratory Embryology Course make up the Las Vegas Sphere. Society for Developmental Biology 85th Annual Meeting Planet Hollywood Resort, Las Vegas, NV, July 23-26, 2026 SDB short logo

Registration and abstract submission are now open for the SDB 85th Annual Meeting being held July 23-26 in Las Vegas! Submit your abstract by April 15. Travel assistance is available. Free t-shirt to the first 250 registrants! Learn more: www.sdbonline.org/2026mtg #2026SDB

Have you ever wondered 🤔... Does phenotypic variance respond to environmental perturbation? Does it have a genetic basis? Are mean and variance regulating loci exposed to different selection pressures? These and more questions are explored in our new preprint 🔥

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Intergeneric chromosomal transfer in yeast results in improved phenotypes and widespread transcriptional responses - Nature Communications Transferring genetic materials between distantly related yeasts, presents technical challenges but can yield industrially interesting phenotypes. Here the authors establish a method to transfer indivi...

Happy to share a recent publication to which I contributed as a corr. author:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This work is in collaboration with Dr. Yao Yu at Fudan University, where the team managed to transfer S. cerevisiae chromosmes into K. marxianus, a species diverged from Sc ~114 mya. (1/4)

Time-calibrated phylogeny of the family Drosophilidae showing major species groups, surrounded by representative adult flies that highlight the remarkable morphological diversity of this model insect group. The composite image was created using Microsoft PowerPoint. Fly photographs were taken by Darren J. Obbard and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License with permission.

The #fly community aims to achieve a comprehensive genomic study of the Drosophilidae family. @pankajd.bsky.social @bernardkim.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social @darrenobbard.bsky.social present a comparative gene annotation for 301 #Drosophilidae species @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c3pyrI

Rethinking insecticide toxicology for the 21st century Insecticides remain indispensable for crop protection and food security, yet their widespread use may contribute to the global decline of beneficial i…

Rethinking insecticide toxicology for the 21st century: a review written with Philip Batterham. Led by Lautaro Gandara @embl.org and Felipe Martelli: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Many said we were exaggerating a year ago when we argued that Trump is a clear and present danger to our democracy. A year later they are eating their words.

It’s up to every single one of us to save our democracy.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/u...

Long-term evolution of regulatory DNA sequences. Part 1: Simulations on global, biophysically-realistic genotype-phenotype maps Promoters and enhancers are cis-regulatory elements (CREs), DNA sequences that bind transcription factor (TF) proteins to up- or down-regulate target genes. Decades-long efforts yielded TF-DNA interac...

🧬✨ New 2-part review on the evolution of regulatory DNA (enhancers & promoters)! What started as conversations between Gasper Tkačik @istaresearch.bsky.social and our group @embl.org grew into a broader synthesis.

Preprints here:
Part 1: arxiv.org/abs/2601.19681
Part 2: arxiv.org/abs/2601.21480

📣 Paper alert!

I am delighted that our paper exploring the impact of Neanderthal-derived variants on the activity of a disease-associated craniofacial enhancer has been published in Development today!
journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

We are thrilled that our study on the evolution of gene regulation in mammalian cerebellum development – led by @ioansarr.bsky.social, @marisepp.bsky.social and @tyamadat.bsky.social, in collaboration with @steinaerts.bsky.social – is now out in @ScienceMagazine! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Come join us in beautiful Roscoff for this Conference Jacques Monod on Developmental regulation: from molecular to ecological niches
May 18-22, 2026 Roscoff, France
Abstract deadline: January 31, 2026
Apply here: cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en

Peer Bork - personal thoughts | Ewan Birney Personal thoughts on the passing of Peer Bork

I have been one of the many people across the world impacted by the sudden death of Peer Bork - a friend, colleague and remarkable scientist. I now have enough time this weekend to write some personal thoughts about Peer. www.linkedin.com/posts/ewan-b...

AI-assisted protein design to rapidly convert antibody sequences to intrabodies targeting diverse peptides and histone modifications AI-powered pipeline converts antibodies into functional intrabodies, enabling live-cell imaging of peptides and histone marks.

Happy New Year all. I know it's been a draining and difficult year for science in general, but wanted to share some good news: our intrabody paper has now been published in Science Advances with lots of additional data.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

DM if you are interested! It should be a unique opportunity!

The call for Health + Life Science Alliance post doctoral fellowships has just opened: lnkd.in/dw9zxKSN.

Joint with my group @embl.org , Victoria Ingham Uni. Heidelberg, and Felix Hol at Radboud Univ., we are exploring how climate and chemistry shape mosquito behaviour for next-gen. vector control

Sign up date coming quickly!
Come join us in beautiful Roscoff for this Conference Jacques Monod on Developmental regulation: from molecular to ecological niches
May 18-22, 2026 Roscoff, France
Abstract deadline: January 31, 2026
Apply here: cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en

Our work on #RegulatoryTrajectories is out today in Nat. Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Led by @raquelrouco.bsky.social, this study establishes a new framework to study how enhancer landscapes act sequentially at developmental loci and are silenced to shape gene expression patterns. (1/n)

Awesome to see it out! Congrats!!

I am very happy (and a bit scared) to present to you what we have been working on over the last 4 years. This manuscript is exactly what I dreamt of when I started the lab and I could not be happier and prouder of the outcome!

Now out: The new ENCODE registry of candidate cis-regulatory elements (🐭/👶)

Major consortium effort, led by @moorejille.bsky.social - stay tuned for her "meme-torial"

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@berkeleylab.lbl.gov @biosci.lbl.gov

An expanded registry of candidate cis-regulatory elements - Nature The existing ENCODE registry of candidate human and mouse cis-regulatory elements is expanded with the addition of new ENCODE data, integrating new functional data as well as new cell and tissue types...

Our paper on the newest version of the Registry of candidate cis-Regulatory Elements (cCREs) is out 🧬

Huge thanks to the many collaborators, experimentalists, analysts and software developers who made this work possible — truly a team effort!

A "meme-torial" of the science is coming soon 👀

What a year it's been at the DB unit @embl.org! 2025 brought us hard work, exciting discoveries, and numerous initiatives that advanced our science. As we wrap up this year, we want to wish everyone a restful and joyful winter break.
We'll be back in 2026, ready for new challenges. See you then! 🎉

Now published as version of record at @elife.bsky.social !

Layers of Immunity: Deconstructing the Drosophila effector response. The tools are now deposited in the VDRC (link ⬇️)

elifesciences.org/articles/107...
shop.vbc.ac.at/vdrc_store/d...

#Drosophila #IDsky #SymbioSky #Infection #Immunology

Pathway to Independence Support postdocs on the job market Line drawing of a person at a bench transitioning to working at a desk Development

Apply for our Pathway to Independence (PI) programme, supporting postdocs in #devbio and #stemcell research during the transition to their first group leader position: www.biologists.com/grants/devel...

Application deadline: 2 February 2026.

Widespread low-affinity motifs enhance chromatin accessibility and regulatory potential in mESCs Low-affinity transcription factor (TF) motifs are an important element of the cis-regulatory code, yet they are notoriously difficult to map and mechanistically incompletely understood, limiting our a...

We are pleased to announce a new preprint by @mlweilert.bsky.social: “Widespread low-affinity motifs enhance chromatin accessibility and regulatory potential in mESCs” (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). See summary and longer recap below:

(TLDR; low-affinity motifs matter as pioneers!)

Heterochromatin epimutations impose mitochondrial dysfunction to confer antifungal resistance | The EMBO Journal imageimageHeterochromatin-island epimutations can provide resistance to caffeine and antifungal drugs in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. This study reveals that some epimutations cause re...

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Our latest now online at EMBO Journal. Read if you are interested in how epimutations mediate antifungal resistance & how this might result in heteroresistance in human & cereal crop fungal pathogens. Big Thx & congrats to Andreas Fellas, Pin Tong & Alison Pidoux

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery?

Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore.

👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

Thermodynamic principles link in vitro transcription factor affinities to single-molecule chromatin states in cells In vitro-derived insights into features that drive transcription factor binding to DNA, including motif-adjacent sequence, enable prediction of chromatin states and transcription factor occupancy in cells.

Now online! Thermodynamic principles link in vitro transcription factor affinities to single-molecule chromatin states in cells