Zhaoming Wu

Jam2 Signaling Functions Downstream of Hand2 To Initiate The Formation Of Organ-Specific Vascular Progenitors In Zebrafish https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.10.681632v1

Twilight Sparkle if fully funded! 🦄

Thanks to your generosity, she’ll receive the medication she needs to manage her seizures and live a comfortable life. We’ll keep you pupdated on her journey here ❤️‍🩹

CSF1R+ macrophage and osteoclast depletion impairs neural crest proliferation and craniofacial morphogenesis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.08.681206v1

Developmental origins of paediatric cancer symposium A one-day event showcasing the latest cutting-edge research on the modelling, biology and treatment of paediatric cancers in the context of their developmental origins.

I am co-organising a @cclguk.bsky.social @dmmjournal.bsky.social symposium on the developmental origins of paediatric cancers at the @crick.ac.uk on 8/6/2026. Great speaker line up, affordable registration and available slots for short talks-spread the word! www.cclg.org.uk/information-...

Developmental Biology and Disability.

“Developmental biology is fundamentally beautiful. We are no less beautiful for our variation. Instead, perhaps we are more so. Perhaps we are remarkable. Perhaps we are full of wonder.”

Insightful post by Bethan ⬇️👀
thenode.biologists.com/developmenta...

I owned 2 ipads and 2 macbooks but the current ones retire I will be apple-free for good.

TWIST1 Modulates Cilia Length, Endocytic Vesicle Dynamics, and Cell-Cell Junctions during Neural Tube Morphogenesis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.03.680308v1

On the left - western blot of B16F10 cells wt and KO for CDK8. Our in house produced antibodies give a lot of unspecific bands. On the right same probes with antibodies preincubated with fixed CDK8 KO cells - there is a specific band and faint unspecific bands, which can be probably eliminated with increase of amount of KO cells.

Neat trick if you polycolonal ab's suck. Incubate them with fixed cells with a KO of your protein of interest, then spin. Protocol here: www.med.upenn.edu/markslab/ass...
I was amazed how well it worked on first try (I'm sure that I can completely eliminate unspecific bands)
#WesternBlot #cellsky

Fine-tuning mechanical constraints reveals uncoupled patterning and gene expression programs in murine gastruloids Highlighted Article: A bioinert confinement system enables dissection of how stiffness and timing shape gastruloid development, revealing uncoupling between polarization and transcriptional programs.

Mechanical constraints disrupt gastruloid polarisation without changing gene expression - uncouples morphogenesis & patterning

Gregor & co use tunable hydrogels to show cell motility, not gene expression, drives axis formation in gastruloids

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

Mechano-osmotic signals control chromatin state and fate transitions in pluripotent stem cells - Nature Cell Biology McCreery, Stubb et al. show that mechano-osmotic changes in the nucleus induce general transcriptional repression and prime chromatin for cell fate transitions by relieving repression of specific differentiation genes.

How do #stemcells integrate information to coordinate fate decisions? Delighted to finally see our work showing how growth factors regulate the mechano-osmotic state of the #nucleus and #chromatin to control #pluripotency exit out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... see 🧵 👇

Megabase-scale human genome rearrangement with programmable bridge recombinases Bridge recombinases are naturally occurring RNA-guided DNA recombinases that we previously demonstrated can programmably insert, excise, and invert DNA in vitro and in Escherichia coli. In this study,...

🧬🌉Online @science.org Megabase-scale human #genome rearrangement with programmable bridge recombinases | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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...

@science.org🧬🔬Functional maps of a #genomic locus reveal confinement of an enhancer by its target #gene | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Photograph of adult, male H. colliei in Puget Sound. (C) Micro-CT scan of male H. colliei. (G) Segmentation of the adult tenaculum. CREDIT: Photograph used with permission from Tiare Boyes.

The Spotted Ratfish, Hydrolagus colliei, is one of a group of fishes called chimaeras whose males sport a unique facial feature: the tenaculum, a club-shaped, cartilaginous appendage covered in teeth. A study investigates these extraoral teeth. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How is developmental speed regulated ? 🪰

Happy to share my PhD story from Schweisguth Lab @devstempasteur.bsky.social. Here we show that cellular NAD+ availability and redox constrain developmental speed in the fly eye.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A big thanks to everyone involved!

Co-option of an ancestral cloacal regulatory landscape during digit evolution - Nature The regulatory landscape controlling Hoxd gene expression in tetrapod digit development was probably co-opted from a pre-existing cloacal regulatory mechanism, as evidenced by the effects of genetic deletion experiments in zebrafish fin, cloaca and mouse urogenital development.

Nature research paper: Co-option of an ancestral cloacal regulatory landscape during digit evolution

go.nature.com/3K576D7

Fig. 1: AIssistant processes an AI-human generated research idea along with supporting notes, routes them through a pipeline of specialized LLM agents, and outputs both a per- spective paper and a review paper.

All hype about the power of facilitating "human-AI collaboration" aside, we don't quickly implement extremely strong norms of disclosure around AI use, science is cooked.

From arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12282, one of many many efforts in this direction.

WDR5 and Myc Cooperate to Regulate Formation of Neural Crest Stem Cells https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.19.677424v1

Diagram comparing chick embryonic lung branching under normal and increased fluid pressure. The left shows normal pressure with typical branching and cell proliferation. The centre depicts global increased pressure, causing altered branching and proliferation. The right shows local increased pressure from an oil droplet, leading to localised disruption of branching and proliferation. Green outlines indicate regions of cell proliferation.

#DBFeature 🐣🫁

Increasing fluid pressure in chick embryonic airways disrupts normal branching and proliferation, while lower pressure encourages branching without affecting cell proliferation

By S Mohr-Allen, J Gleghorn, and V Varner

tinyurl.com/5fyevrd3

#SpecialIssue on Avian model systems

This report is very misleading

being a left-leaning yet not from the west is really frustrating

Very happy to share the work of Huanhuan Li et al. While not a natural embryo, you might not have known that if I hadn’t told you. (1/3)

Schematic of how Vangl2 regulates cellular organization in both local and distant compartments through a vinculin-dependent mechanism. Left: Wildtype. Right: Localized Vangl2 deletion. The deletion of Vangl2 in either the greater epithelial ridge (GER) or the organ of Corti results in defects in cellular organization, such as the misorientation of hair cells and GER cells. These defects occur in the local and distant compartments, the latter via a vinculin-dependent process termed “compartment coupling”.

#Morphogens cooperate to guide development of the #cochlea. This Primer explores a @plosbiology.org study showing how #PlanarCellPolarity of individual cells is integrated across distinct regional compartments to ensure proper organ #morphogenesis. Paper: plos.io/4nmD8IW Primer: plos.io/3IjPkLR

C looks like a pig

We show the Organ of Corti is composed of adhesion-molecule based compartments and the interaction between these compartments (compartment coupling) drives pattern and polarity. This seems like a fundamental design principle of developing tissues.

Shark tooth regeneration: RNAseq reveals genes for unlimited dental renewal https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.26.672487v1

Flexible competency framework: A tool for optimizing life science training Life sciences research requires high standards of rigor and professionalism, which need to be woven into the training future scientists. This Community Page presents a competency-based framework to us...

How can we improve the #training of future #biology researchers? This Community Page presents a competency-based framework to use to align curriculum and trainee outcomes with educational objectives in the life sciences. 🧪 #academicsky
plos.io/3HIpuB1

About rotating tissues
bsky.app/profile/epim...

The "justifiable part" was just my uninformed guess. Would love to learn more!

I might be wrong but I guess thanks to the mass adoption of electric cars, solar panels etc. despite the new coal plant the total carbon release might still be decreasing. Renewable energy sources are unevenly distributed, carbon based energy might be justifiable at certain places ...

Reconstructing Waddington's Landscape from Data The development of a zygote into a functional organism requires that this single progenitor cell gives rise to numerous distinct cell types. Attempts to exhaustively tabulate the interactions within d...

Latest on Waddington Landscapes: Computational methods to fit dynamical landscapes directly to single cell data

Applied to neural tube patterning shows morphogen-signalling landscapes can be linearly interpolated

Connects interpretable landscape models with data

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...