Justin Crocker

Model organisms as platforms for training scientific minds

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

A good day to remember John Gurdon’s school report from his biology master at Eton

The DB unit also celebrated Anne Ephrussi at this wonderful symposium! Anne was our unit head from 2007-2021. Congratulations on a remarkable career, Anne! 🎉

Kinetic organization of the genome revealed by ultraresolution multiscale live imaging Genome function requires regulated genome motion. However, tools to directly observe this motion in vivo have been limited in coverage and resolution. Here we introduce an approach to tile mammalian c...

Congrats to my friends in the Boettiger lab for this really beautiful live imaging work. A big leap forward in understanding the dynamic side of genome organization. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very proud of our paper on "scrambling-by-hopping" LADs, which was just published: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Congrats to Lise Dauban and the rest of the team – this was a real tour-de-force!

Functional maps of a genomic locus reveal confinement of an enhancer by its target gene Genes are often activated by enhancers located at large genomic distances, and the importance of this positioning is poorly understood. By relocating promoter-reporter constructs into thousands of alt...

Functional maps of a genomic locus reveal confinement of an enhancer by its target gene by the @basvansteensellab.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very excited to see this work in press! I think there is a reason to believe that this is a common means of stabilizing large-effect polymorphisms in general and might be an important reason for why diploidy is so common. news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Join this year's CSH Asia Systems Biology of Gene Regulation & Genome Editing meeting in beautiful Suzhou, China, Oct 20-24. Let's bring the international communities together! Abstract deadline Sept 19! Infos and registration at csh-asia.org?content/2767. Please repost!

‘Our Ancestors the Fish’, a course by Prof. @neilshubin.bsky.social, Univ of Chicago, invited Prof @college-de-france.fr. in Paris @psl-univ.bsky.social. Four conferences, free access, open to everyone, with Tiktaalik as a guest star. Friends, colleagues and fossils in Paris and around, please RT🥁

Now I'm scared to use em and en dashes...

O’Neill, unlike Monarez, has no training in medicine or infectious disease science. He is a former speechwriter for the health department, during the Bush years, who went on to work for the tech investor and conservative megadonor Peter Thiel. During the Covid pandemic, O’Neill voiced public support for unproven treatments that were not supported by scientific evidence, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, as well as vitamin D as a supposed “prophylaxis”. He also posted a number of conspiratorial theories on social media, including the baseless claim that “the name #COVID was chosen to conceal the origin of the virus. This name made it harder to study and probably slowed the response.”

On the new acting CDC director. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

My lab cannot afford donating at the moment, so I donated privately. Even if you don’t work on flies we all owe so much to FlyBase. Consider donating, and importantly, let’s strive to make the more official funding bodies aware of how much is at stake.

+1 here.

Reach us out early enough !
Getting funding and personal timelines aligned rarely happens over night !

Drosophila research without FlyBase would be untenable. Time for all labs who can afford it to step up.

From genes to patterns: five key dynamical systems concepts to decode developmental regulatory mechanisms Summary: Dynamical systems theory provides a powerful quantitative and intuitive framework to understand developmental processes. This Primer brings key concepts of this framework to the ever-growing ...

A Summer reading recommendation: new primer in @dev-journal.bsky.social explains how dynamical systems theory unlocks the logic of developmental patterning

Everything from bistable switches & oscillators to phase portraits & more with Python code to explore

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

🪰 Welcome to the EMBO Practical Course 'Drosophila genetics and genomics'! #EMBODrosophila

Participants will gain hands-on experience and insights from leading experts in the field – let the learning and collaboration begin! 🙌🏼

@embl.org @embo.org @justinmcrocker.bsky.social

Currents of Change: Metabolism shaping cell fate and evolution #MetabolismMondays - the Node All the world's a metabolic dance, early career scientists are leading the way! Emerging perspectives in metabolism Anna-Lena Brigitte Gunda VigilPhD

#MetabolismMondays
Meet Anna Vigil, #PhD student in @justinmcrocker.bsky.social lab @embl.org @embldbunit.bsky.social, discussing her work on how #metabolism impacts cell fate, development & #evolution #Drosophila.
#theNodeCorrespondents #ecr @the-node.bsky.social #DevBio

Amazing news! Congrats!!!

Range extender mediates long-distance enhancer activity - Nature The REX element is associated with long-range enhancer–promoter interactions.

Our paper describing the Range Extender element which is required and sufficient for long-range enhancer activation at the Shh locus is now available at @nature.com. Congrats to @gracebower.bsky.social who led the study. Below is a brief summary of the main findings www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

Two-panel cartoon set in a desert with mountains and cacti. Top panel: A green box labeled “ENHANCER” stands on the left, shouting weakly “Turn on, please?!?” toward a distant blue spiky blob labeled “GENE” on the right, who is asleep with a “Zzz.” Bottom panel: The enhancer now uses a microphone connected to a large purple speaker labeled “REX,” which amplifies the message “Turn on!!” in a bold speech bubble across the desert. The gene is now awake and alert with wide eyes and a happy expression. Image credit: Emma Visel

Getting the message across from a distance:

🧬REX🧬 is a “Range EXtender” element that can turn short-range into looooooooooooong-range enhancers

Great collaboration led by @gracebower.bsky.social and @evgenykvon.bsky.social

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

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

A decade of preprints in biology

How @biologists.bsky.social has championed preprint adoption since 2014

Launching preLights, supporting Review Commons & introducing In Preprints in @dev-journal.bsky.social

E&E News: Farm industry lobbyist, MAHA critic to head EPA pesticides office Kyle Kunkler departs from the American Soybean Association to take the helm of the agency's program regulating farm chemicals.

Lobbyist who spent past 5 years advocating against regulations on pesticides has been chosen to head the EPA pesticides office. subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eene...

A Drosophila single-cell 3D spatiotemporal multi-omics atlas unveils panoramic key regulators of cell-type differentiation This work introduces Flysta3D-v2, a 3D spatiotemporal multi-omics database that spans Drosophila development from embryogenesis to metamorphosis. Through the integration of multimodal data, we detail ...

A Drosophila single-cell 3D spatiotemporal multi-omics atlas unveils panoramic key regulators of cell-type differentiation: Cell
1/2

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

HE’S BAAACK!

Mark your calendars for May 18-22, 2026- in Roscoff, Brittany, for the next iteration of the Developmental Biology Conference Jacques Monod!

A Fully Synthetic Transcriptional Platform for a Multicellular Eukaryote Regions of genomic DNA called enhancers encode binding sites for transcription factor proteins. Binding of activators and repressors increase and redu…

2) This work reminds me of some stuff that @justinmcrocker.bsky.social did a while ago on synthetic enhancers in Drosophila:

Great meeting!!!

Moving towards the end of #ShapingLife3 with the last Keynote speaker @justinmcrocker.bsky.social

We currently have a call for support that has gone out to European labs, to support FlyBase-UK. We are asking our colleagues from labs in the US and other countries to wait for a similar call to them that will go out in the near future, to support the US sites. We thank you for your patience.

Drosophila Genetic Database The Drosophila Genetic Database, FlyBase, is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden termination of the FlyBase NIH grant, which includes salaries for 5 literature curators based at the University ...

Flybase lost all of the NIH support overnight - it is a disaster for the community. Please consider donating. I just did! www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...