Ann C. Morris

A chicken neural crest explant with neural crest marker sox9 in green, e-cadherin in orange, filamentous actin in magenta, and nuclei in gray.

Today for #FluorescenceFriday I’m sharing a 👻Halloween-themed🎃 neural crest explant “web of cells” from Julia Godinez, a 4th year @ucdavis.bsky.social graduate student in the lab. She is studying mechanisms driving conserved and divergent cranial neural crest migration and differentiation. #DevBio

👇 Article w/ my PhD student Danae Mitchell @danaenm.bsky.social on 🤩 work in @nature.com by @arimolofskylab.bsky.social & Tom Arnold led by Nathan Ewing-Crystal @nathanec.bsky.social on the complex response of 🧠 fibroblasts to injury.

🧠 fibroblasts form scars but are not 'scary'...they help out! 👻

We're excited to share with everyone a preprint of our manuscript that resolves the cellular origins of the symbiosome in cnidarian-algal symbiosis through proteomics of the symbiosome, RNAi, and CRISPR/Cas9 experiments. ⬇️
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Read on below!

1/12 🧵

Come be our colleague -- review of applications starts tomorrow!

This #microscopymonday is a cleaning day. Watch how a #microglia cell mops up and phagozytoses debris and junk in a very messy neuronal co-culture. BTW, it was a proper cleaning job → the neurons made it and formed nice networks
Phase contrast imaging started at DIV1. One frame per 20 min.

Very sad news, John Gurdon has died.

A developmental biologist's developmental biologist, Nobel prize winner

His work is the foundation of much of today's dev & stem cell bio.

An inspiration to many, including me. Always asking questions & wanting the answers

www.magd.cam.ac.uk/news/profess...

We're hiring! Please repost -- application review starts 10/13.

WFMU's Hellraiser Fundraiser starts today, and runs through October! There will be many DJ specials, new swag, and events throughout the month celebrating WFMU. If you can, help us out with a donation and grab one of two new Hellraiser T-shirts. Pledge here: pledge.wfmu.org

Assistant or Associate Professor in Microbiology The Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY seeks to fill a tenure-eligible faculty position at the Assistant or Associate Professor le...

Assistant or Associate Professor of Microbiology at the University of Kentucky: ukjobs.uky.edu/postings/601...
#academic jobs #edusky

This only happens to you once

Illustration of a fishman creature with human limbs and fish head and tail, interacting with a DNA string

"Fishman", proposal for a journal cover.
Commissioned by MY Dennis' lab @mydennis.bsky.social for a study focused on identifying human-specific gene duplications and their role in brain evolution using genomics and zebrafish as model. @dcsoto.bsky.social
#art #digitalart #sciart #fish

Phenomenal. In my 10 year update of A Brief History, I make the point that in the first edition, not one disease had been successfully treated using gene therapy. Today that number is at least 7.

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that could transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC

Wonderful news. A salutary reminder of the absolute benefits of scientific progress, and the absolute evil of conspiracist bollocks.

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time www.bbc.com/news/article...

🧵1/14 Preprint thread! Can we predict a cell’s fate based on its dynamics? 🔮 Our new study unveils a framework for watching development unfold in real-time, revealing how a cell's shape and movement encode info about its future fate. 🔬📄 Preprint: tinyurl.com/4shf8v4x

Goyal Lab

**POSTDOC POSITION** My lab (www.goyallab.org) at Northwestern and CZ Biohub Chicago looking for a postdoctoc in quantitative biology. We work on a range of topics, including single-cell cancer plasticity, modeling single-cell perturbations, theory, and stem-embryo models. contact via email. Pls RT

Image of a developing mouse lung section showing SHH-expressing epithelial cells in green. Non-expressing cells are marked by magenta membrane stain. DAPI marks nuclei in blue.

Happy #MicroscopyMonday! Here is a 🔬 image of epithelial cells of the embryonic 🐭 lung expressing a membrane-GFP reporter for my favorite signaling protein, Sonic Hedgehog (SHH). Non-SHH expressing cells are shown with magenta membrane stain. 🔬 by @christinaadaly.bsky.social 🧪 #DevBio

#FluorescenceFriday
#Seahorse retina stained with #GNB3 (green) + #DAPI (cyan). GNB3 labels cone photoreceptors + ON #bipolarcells, tracing pathways from outer to inner retina. Amazing to see conserved visual #circuits in this non-traditional model

a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out . ALT: a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out .

👁️The retina — strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians!

So how did it evolve?

With @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social, we argue that retinal complexity may 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n

LINE-1 retrotransposons mediate cis-acting transcriptional control in human pluripotent stem cells and regulate early brain development Adami et al. demonstrate that evolutionarily young L1s are expressed in human pluripotent stem cells and are dynamically regulated throughout neural differentiation. The study examines the role of L1s...

New paper from our lab! We found that LINE-1 transposons contribute to early human brain development.

Funded by @asapresearch.parkinsonsroadmap.org

www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

YouTube video by NFB Cosmic Zoom

I didn't realise that there was a precursor to Powers of Ten, made in Canada and called Cosmic Zoom 🙂
#PhysicsEd
#iTeachPhysics
#Science 🧪

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgfw...

Quote graphic featuring a photo of a human eye and the quote: "A wide variety of model systems have been utilised to understand the function of PAX6 in early eye development, but divergence of developmental mechanisms means findings do not always translate to humans ... Stem cell-derived 3D retinal organoids have become a robust tool for studying early eye development, with self-organisation of cells into distinct layers of the neural retina (NR) reflecting in vivo organogenesis." Attributed to Harding P, Owen N, et al. (2025). doi:10.1016/j.bbadis.2025.167869

Using patient-derived optic #organoids and #multiomics analysis, researchers discovered a new role for #PAX6 in regulating SOX2 and Notch signaling during early eye development, offering mechanistic insight into PAX6-related ocular disorders.

doi.org/10.1016/j.bb...

#devbio 🧪

Differential regulation of eye specification in Drosophila by Polycomb Group epigenetic repressors Highlighted Article: Distinct gene sets are differentially expressed in response to the knockdown of Polycomb Group (PcG) members, suggesting that multiple avenues may exist for the eye to be transfor...

My lab's newest research paper on the Drosophila eye is published in Development today. Thanks to the editorial staff for writing a research highlight and interviewing us about our work.

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

📣 New paper alert! Just out in Cell Reports! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40644298/
Thrilled to share that we have discovered a brand-new anti-phage defense system! Bacteria have evolved various defense strategies (CRISPR etc) to counter phage attacks. We found a new one - fascinating and dramatic
⚔️🦠❄️🔬

Here is the application to for duty-free entry of scientific equipment www.trade.gov/sites/defaul...

If you are buying something this summer or fall, this is a good document to look at regardless, so you know what kind of due diligence is required to request the tariff waiver.

Cell cycle duration determines oncogenic transformation capacity Danian Chen, Suying Lu, Katherine Huang, Joel D. Pearson, Marek Pacal, Phillipos Peidis, Sean McCurdy, Tao Yu, Monika Sangwan, Angela Nguyen, Philippe P. Monnier, Daniel Schramek, Liang Zhu, David Santamaria, Mariano Barbacid, Nagako Akeno, Kathryn A. Wikenheiser-Brokamp & Rod Bremner https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08935-x

A recent paper reveals a surprising insight. The length of the cell cycle in a particular tissue determines the oncogenic transformation capacity of particular oncogenes, with tissues with shorter cell cycles most susceptible 3/n

Enhancer adoption by an LTR retrotransposon generates viral-like particles, causing developmental limb phenotypes - Nature Genetics Activation of an LTR retrotransposon inserted upstream of the Fgf8 gene produces viral-like particles in the mouse developing limb, triggering apoptosis and causing limb malformation. This phenotype c...

Our new story in Nature Genetics: endogenous retroviruses can produce viral-like particles in the embryo resulting in apoptosis and congenital malformation. If this would happen in human, it wouldn't leave a trace. No WGS or other analysis would identify this. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very pleased to say we have an Assistant Professor job opening (tenure track) in the Department of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin! 😀
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOA399/a... - deadline is August 19th! Please repost!