Fletcher Lab

YouTube video by Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network 2025 Physics of Life Symposium: Siddhansh Agarwal

Check out Siddhansh (@sid592.bsky.social) presentation at the 4th Physics of Life Symposium hosted by the #CZBiohubSF. youtu.be/b7G5wyE6iyo?...

Happy Postdoc Appreciation Week to all of our postdocs! #PostdocAppreciationWeek

Congratulations Kira for passing your qualifying exam!

Multi-contrast machine learning improves schistosomiasis diagnostic performance Author summary Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that impacts hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Patients with Schistosoma haematobium shed parasite eggs in their urine, which can...

Take a look at our newest published article in PLOS NTD: doi.org/10.1371/jour... #schistosomiasis #ML #diagnostics

Cell surface crowding is a tunable energetic barrier to cell-cell fusion Nature Communications - Cell-cell fusion is fundamental to physiological processes such as muscle formation and viral infection. Here, the authors show that the proteins embedded on the plasma...

Check out our most recent published paper in @natcomms.nature.com about the effects of cell surface crowding in cell-cell fusion: rdcu.be/ezCOF

YouTube video by Schmidt Science Fellows 2025 Interdisciplinary Science Summit Showcase Talk: Deepak Krishnamurthy

Check out this talk by one of our amazing postdocs, Deepak! youtu.be/ErE3f5iyPio

Had fun at the MBL Physiology Course in Woods Hole!
Chunzi, Elizabeth & Kira led creative rotations:
• Trogocytosis is a mi(gh)t-y way to transfer
• Sync(ytium) or Swim: Which fusogen will reign supreme?
• Mucin Impossible: Eat up or get lost

Welcome to our new BioE Ph.D. students, Smiti and Michael Anne! @smitim.bsky.social

Congratulations Caitlin!!

Come to the Annual Fletcher Lab Artshow on Friday May 9th, 2025! We host this event yearly as an opportunity for folks to display their artwork, come together with wine and cheese, and admire artwork!

Come explore and be amazed on April 12 and 13 at the @exploratorium.bsky.social. This event is based upon work supported by the Center for Cellular Construction. #microscopy #Magnified

Congratulations to both Jared and Andres for passing their qualifying exams

Thanks to our collaborators: @gatesfoundation.bsky.social, @isaacbogoch.bsky.social, Spotlab, GH Labs, ISM, CERMEL, UHN, among others.

The NTDscope is a portable brightfield, darkfield, and fluorescence microscope used for the diagnosis of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Check out our latest preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

🌟Say hello to Dan Fletcher @fletcherlabucb.bsky.social, a bioengineer renowned for developing novel experimental approaches and microscopy tools with far-reaching impacts on our understanding of infectious diseases, immunology, and cancer biology. 1/

preLights in cell biology (February 2025) This article includes recent preLights posts that discuss preprints in the field of cell biology.Target cell tension regulates macrophage trogocytosis by Caitlin E. Cornell et al.Read the preLight.Vis...

preLights in cell biology (Feb 2025)

This article lists the recent @prelights.bsky.social posts that discuss #preprints in #cellbio. Featured #preLight by @fadelvalle.bsky.social covering work on macrophage trogocytosis from @fletcherlabucb.bsky.social.

journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Some lab members and friends attended the #StandupforScience protest.

Dan Fletcher speaks in front of a banner that reads Schmidt Science Fellows

A group photo from the Science Leadership Program

“We have a role to play in making the world a better place.”

Thank you to #RhodesScholar Professor Dan Fletcher for hosting our partners Schmidt Science Fellows at UC, Berkeley for another year as part of the Science Leadership Program.
@fletcherlabucb.bsky.social 📷 @claudinegossett.bsky.social

Fun story from the Fletcher lab showing that surface crowding is a major impediment to cell-cell fusion and myoblasts reduce their surface crowding to improve fusion!

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

Target cell tension regulates macrophage trogocytosis Macrophages are known to engulf small membrane fragments, or trogocytose, target cells and pathogens, rather than fully phagocytose them. However, little is known about what causes macrophages to choo...

This supports the idea that target cell's biophysical properties regulate the decision to trogocytose instead of phagocytose, as Caitlin Cornell @fletcherlabucb.bsky.social proposed in their recent preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.02.626490

Check out our latest preprint where we show how you can improve automated detection of schistosomiasis by using images of multiple contrasts (brightfield and darkfield) acquired on a mobile microscope! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy Lunar New Year! We hope the Lunar New Year brings you much health and happiness. #HappyLunarNewYear2025

Cell surface crowding is a tunable biophysical barrier to cell-cell fusion Cell-cell fusion is fundamental to developmental processes such as muscle formation, as well as to viral infections that cause pathological syncytia. An essential step in fusion is close membrane appo...

Check out our most recent paper about a previously under-appreciated crowding barrier to cell-cell fusion. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Felipe (@fadelvalle.bsky.social) did a fantastic job summarizing the main points and asking intriguing questions for our future next steps. Check it out!

Happy New Year! Let’s continue pushing the boundaries of science and knowledge

Using fluorescence anisotropy and theoretical modeling, we can now quantify how floppy or rigid molecules are when they're attached to surfaces. We tested it on DNA and red blood cell surface molecules! #biophysics #microscopy #DNA #cellbiology #anisotropy

Excited to share our latest paper: SurFlex microscopy! A new technique to measure the flexibility of surface-tethered biomolecules. Congrats to Aymeric, @sid592.bsky.social and @blenackmon.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you are attending #CellBio2024, be sure to attend our lab member's oral and poster presentations. @ascbiology.bsky.social

Kinetics and Optimality of Influenza A Virus Locomotion Studies of influenza A's unusual propulsion strategy suggest that drugs could target a critical protein.

Congrats Siddhansh for your newly published paper titled "Kinetics and Optimality of Influenza A Virus Locomotion."
journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

At the beginning of the video, the macrophage is trogocytosing a giant unilamellar vesicle at low tension (0.27 mN/m). Pipette suction is applied and tension is increased to 3.68 mN/m and the macrophage begins to engulf the GUV. #macrophages #trogocytosis #GUV #biophysics