David Brückner

🧪⚛️ Surface tension—driven by non-equilibrium currents not forces—in pattern formation leads to the same type of interface laws as in liquid foams: Plateau laws, von Neumann evolution; and a new emergent phenomenon: domain splitting akin to cell division. nature.com/articles/s4156…

Congrats again!!! :)

New preprint! Do you like ocean waves? We found similar waves on bacterial colonies! We found that this collective behavior, known as rippling, is nothing but surface waves on an active nematic. @princeton.edu @mpipks.bsky.social @ub.edu @icreacommunity.bsky.social

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

This coming wednesday Dec. 3rd @college-de-france.fr, the annual #FrançoisJacob symposium. This year is about ‘Biology in the Flow of Time’⏱️. Superbe line up of speakers on various aspects. Come and enjoy (should you have time), free access, no registration🤘

🚨 New preprint!
We built a single-cell atlas of 14 multilayered epithelia and revealed a conserved transcriptomic program guiding tissue architecture and fate composition. Our work brings decades of tissue-specific studies together into a unified evo-devo framework.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Great science & fruiful discussions last Friday the 14th Nov. around "the physics of Stem cells" , the 2025 Stem Cell Initiative & QBio joint symposium.

An honour to have Meryem Baghdadi & David Brückner as keynote speakers, who gave inspiring talks.

🙏🙏 to all our speakers & poster presenters.

Advanced grad students + postdocs: apply for the 2026 #kitpqbio summer course, "Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals," at buff.ly/OXXMKEv. Apply by Feb. 1.
Course directors Adrienne Roeder (Cornell) and Sebastian Streichan (UCSB)

The cis-regulatory logic integrating spatial and temporal patterning in the vertebrate neural tube Zhang et al. identify a global temporal chromatin program that operates across the developing vertebrate nervous system to control neural cell diversity. This mechanism, which involves Nr6a1 and NFIA/...

Good to see the peer reviewed version of this in print

The cis-regulatory logic integrating spatial and temporal patterning in the vertebrate neural tube

A global temporal chromatin program operates across the vertebrate nervous system to control neural cell diversity

www.cell.com/developmenta...

Wonderful to see the beautiful preprint from Sabate et al now published - TADs are also dynamic structures in human cells, with remarkably similar parameters between mESCs and HCT116 cells
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Active droplets are fundamental in cell biology and origin of life. With Jonathan Bauermann, @boekhovenlab.bsky.social, Frank Jülicher, and @m-pol.bsky.social, we show that a critical transition influences their size, morphology, ripening and division propensity

journals.aps.org/prx/abstract...

Super excited to finally visit our collaborators @heemskerklab.bsky.social at the University of Michigan!

Seminar tomorrow at 1 PM

singlecellspatialanalysis.umich.edu/scsap-monthl...

Had a great time at the "Physics of Stem Cells" Meeting at Institut Pasteur last week!

Many inspiring talks with different perspectives on how stem cells make decisions

Hi, I’m David Brückner @davidbrueckner.bsky.social.

I’ll take you through how cells in a tissue can use information distributed by biochemical gradients to make decisions, and how we can measure such positional information.

buff.ly/RFxVeHh

Promoter-proximal gatekeepers restrict pleiotropic enhancer inputs to achieve tissue specificity Developmental enhancers are central regulatory elements that can activate multiple genes, yet how they selectively regulate one gene over its neighbours remains unclear. Using the Drosophila twist E3 ...

Ever wondered what drives enhancer-promoter specificity? Why would an enhancer activate one gene rather than another neighboring one?

Check our latest preprint, led by @mmasoura.bsky.social, to find out!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Wolpert, L. (1969). Positional information and the spatial pattern of cellular differentiation. Journal of theoretical biology, 25(1), 1-47. #EpithelialMechanics

🌍Open call: Junior Group Leader positions!

Join a world-class biomedical research institute at the heart of the Vienna BioCenter, where curiosity drives discovery.

Lead your own lab, pursue bold ideas, and shape the future of science at the IMP: www.imp.ac.at/career/open-...

Jan Rozman, Sumesh P. Thampi, Julia M. Yeomans: Why Extensile and Contractile Tissues Could be Hard to Tell Apart https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07012 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07012 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.07012

Switzerland is joining Horizon Europe!

We are uniting two research powerhouses.

For cutting-edge innovation that will boost our energy security, digital transformation, health and so much more.

Today is a good day for science, and for our EU-Switzerland partnership.

Brückner, D. B., & Tkačik, G. (2024). Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, #EpithelialMechanics www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We provide a perspective on how this framework could help to formalize the spectrum of patterning processes from instructed to self-organized development at multiple levels.

We propose a way to organize our current thinking about the algorithmic level along a set of architectures formalizing the computational capacity and amount of lateral coupling between cells

We propose that many current approaches are not competing ideas, but look at the same fundamental problem - egg to embryo - from different perspectives:

1️⃣ Normative theories & optimality formalize the computationa problem

2️⃣ Dynamical systems provide algorithms

3️⃣ GRNs & others model implementation

How can we organize current theoretical approaches for developmental biology - from information to dynamical systems & GRNs - into a common framework?

We propose to think along Marr's 3 levels: computational problem, algorithm, implementation

Check out our review:
arxiv.org/abs/2510.24536

Mechanosensitive calcium channels and integrins coordinate the reprogramming of colorectal cancer cells into a fetal-like state van der Net et al. show that mechanical interactions with the stromal component collagen I trigger reprogramming of colorectal cancer cells into a fetal-like state, through mechanosensitive integrins ...

We finally made it over here ! And excited to share our new paper on mechanical forces regulating stem cell plasticity in colorectal cancer, involving force transduction via mechanosensitive calcium channels! www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Epithelial convergent extension as a tuning process https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.06.687029v1

Crosstalk between tissue mechanics and BMP4 signaling regulates symmetry breaking in human gastrula models Brivanlou and colleagues used optogenetics to spatially control BMP4 expression in human stem cell models across different mechanical regimes. By combining these experiments with mathematical modeling...

A lovely example of the interplay of morphogen dynamics, tissue mechanics, cell mechanics and signal transduction at the most crucial stage of embryogenesis. And a good example of why talk of development being "programmed" into the genome is simply the wrong language.
www.cell.com/cell-stem-ce...

Congratulations!

Congratulations! Sounds super exciting!

Excited to visit CRG & EMBL Barcelona tomorrow!

‘Memory foam’ skeleton in cells helps them to navigate Cells change shape to move efficiently in a range of spatial environments. This response can be informed by the cell’s memory of past deformation.

Nice highlight by Joseph d’Alessandro & Mélina Heuzé on our recent paper about mechanical memory in migrating cells with @sgabriele.bsky.social and @kyohalie.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/d41...