Cnidarian developmental mechanisms group

Tested in Clytia too - by @sassaf.bsky.social and @momotsuyo.bsky.social !

Is the deuterostome clade an artifact???

New paper with first author @anaserrasilva.bsky.social, Laura Piovani, Paschalis Natsidis and project co-led by Paschalia Kapli.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bravo @juliarmateu.bsky.social et @annaferraioli.bsky.social, merci à Richard Copley pour ce travail co-dirigée, et merci aux collaboratrices coralistes Isabelle Domart-Coulon (MNHN, Paris) et Núria Teixidó (LOV, et Ischia Marine Center, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn)

for the moment the application site seems to be in french only www.embrc-france.fr/en/node/9845

Interested in visiting Villefranche, Roscoff or Banyuls marine stations? The EMBRC-France (www.embrc-france.fr) 8th Call for Projects is open. Deadline Sept 19 for stays by end of June 2026. Up to 42 person-days per project are covered, with access to EMBRC-France services, accommodation & catering.

Excited to finally see my PhD work published! We identified specialized cells in jellyfish and coral larvae with shared features and potentially linked to settlement regulation.

Our chromosome-scale genome assembly of Nanomia septata, a siphonophore - doi.org/10.1101/2025... . Much larger than many other cnidarian genomes, fewer chromosomes, and highly rearranged. No smoking gun for how they achieve complex colony-level organization. Great work Namrata Ahuja and friends!

Examples pf Coral larva aboral cell types

Careful scRNAseq and characterisation of cell types from larve of 3 cnidarian species uncovered shared features. This work can help understanding of animal nervous system evolution, and identified potential regulators of larval settlement !
Bravo @juliarmateu.bsky.social @annaferraioli.bsky.social

Aboral cell types of Clytia and coral larvae have shared features and link taurine to the regulation of settlement Larvae of jellyfish and corals have specialized sensory cells with shared features potentially linked to settlement regulation.

"Aboral cell types of Clytia and coral larvae have shared features and link taurine to the regulation of settlement" Kudos to Julia Ramon-Mateu and Anna Ferraioli @biodev-vlfr.bsky.social, and thanks to our collaborators for their coral larva expertise www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sponges, ctenophores and the statistical significance of syntenies Shared fusions between ancestral chromosomal linkage groups have previously been used to support phylogenetic groupings, notably sponges with cnidarians and bilaterians to the exclusion of ctenophores...

New entry into the sponge/ctenophore debate.... Have the chromosome fusions separating ctenophores from all other animals been given too much weight? Beautifully clearly written paper covering complex arguments from @rcply.bsky.social.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It's publication day of my first book: The Tree of Life. The tree of life is a time machine that can take us back 4 billion years to meet our most distant ancestor. It is the magic that lets us tell the origin stories, beginning with this ancient relative, of everything from mushrooms to man.

Cartoon of autonomous and light-modulated spwning cycles in Clytia IZ-D

Intriguing findings from our Sendai collaborators Ruka Kitsui and Ryusaku Deguchi. While C. hemispherica spawns at dawn, Clytia IZ-D species spawns at dusk. This is not triggered by dark but, unexpectedly, by light-mediated extension of an autonomously-running 20h cycle. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The Hydractinia cell atlas reveals cellular and molecular principles of cnidarian coloniality - Nature Communications Here they generate a cell type atlas of the colonial cnidarian Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, which reveals that distinct colony parts are mostly made from unique combinations of shared cell types, an...

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

🤝 @cnrscotedazur.bsky.social @sorbonne-universite.fr @clytia-vlfr.bsky.social

Lire l'article dans @elife.bsky.social
👉 buff.ly/439XGxG

Now out as a Reviewed Preprint on eLife - Thanks to the reviewers for their positive and constructive assessments! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Our lab has multiple open positions for post-docs to study the regulation and function of cytoplasm mechanics during embryo development.
Details below 👇👇
Please Repost !!!

@ijmonod.bsky.social @cnrs.bsky.social

This will be great !

Big exciting news! The next Cnidarian Model Systems Meeting, better known as Cnidofest, will be held at the Marine Biological Laboratory from September 23-27, 2026. Mark your calendars!!! After two land-locked meetings, we are returning to an ocean view!!! 🌊🪸 @mblscience.bsky.social

Happy 2025!
Jellyfish in Paris @clytia-vlfr.bsky.social

Happy New Year Marie-Emilie!

Figure 1 (C) In situ hybridization detection of ClyARPP19 mRNA in a whole newly budded young medusa recently released from the polyp colony, and an adult ovary. Cartoons show tissue organization. ARPP19 mRNA is strongly detected in oocytes, around the bell rim where the nerve rings are positioned, and at the sites of neural stem cell populations. (D) Confocal images of Clytia oocytes stained with the anti-XeENSA antibody (a) or with the anti-XeENSA antibody pre-absorbed with ENSA protein (b). In each pair, images in the left are of anti-ENSA staining and images on the right are of DNA stained with Hoechst. The oocyte nucleus (GV) is positioned opposite the attached gastrodermal cells (gas)

ARPP19 phosphorylation site evolution and the switch in cAMP control of oocyte maturation in vertebrates

Read this Research Article by Ferdinand Meneau, Marika Miot and colleagues @clytia-vlfr.bsky.social:
https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.202655

YouTube video by Multicellgenome Lab EMBO meeting

#Multicellularity enthusiasts! Mark your calendars! EMBO Workshop on "Evolution and Origins of Multicellularity Across the Tree of Life"
📅 October 9-11, 2025, Barcelona

🔗 Pre-register here: coming-soon.embo.org/w25-102

@csic.es @embopress.org
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxKj...

A few days left to apply 🙌🏻

For anyone interested in how Metchnikoff's early studies in embryology linked to his later work on macrophophages and immunity, here is a nice account from Ibon Cancio from Bilbao. Illustrating again how marine stations are incubators for curiosity-led research 😉 www.embrc.eu/newsroom/new...

That was another nice find -thanks John. We love Metchnikoff too -especially for his substantial contribution to invertebrate embryology, including of course this !

How come PKA signalling has opposite roles for oocyte maturation in vertebrates compared to many other species? We unpicked this “cAMP paradox” in a cross-species collaboration, charting phosphorylation site evolution of the key regulator ARPP19. Meneau et al. DOI: 10.1242/dev.202655

This looks interesting!

So, we are also opening an account here. Same idea as in twitter: we will explain our work as well as the work of others in the field of multicellularity, animal origins, and #protists. #ProtistsOnSky We focus a lot on unicellular relatives of animals, mostly #Ichthyosporea & #Filasterea.

Aboral cell types of Clytia and coral larvae have shared features and link taurine to the regulation of settlement
Julia Ramon-Mateu, Anna Ferraioli, Núria Teixidó, Isabelle Domart-Coulon, Evelyn Houliston, Richard R. Copley
bioRxiv 2024.10.30.621027; doi: doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Would you like to join us in screening these tags in diverse species? Please get in touch. We're happy to share the constructs for generating mRNA, and will be happy to include new species –and new co-authors– in our comparative study. 3/4