Dhanur Prakash Iyer

Join us for a new zoom series on metabolism and development. This will be a monthly feature with PIs and trainees presenting.
Sign up here (forms.gle/Y8QzucogKKrZ...) to get the Zoom link and join the mailing list.

After some limbo, paper #1 finally accepted (i.p.). Watch out for a comprehensively updated version of pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39711539/.
coming soon. My gratitude to the reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions and critical but fair review. Kudos to Joe and Zaza for all the hard work!

Nodal/Smad2 signaling sustains developmental pausing by repressing Pparg-mediated lipid metabolism Cells and organisms can enter transient dormant states to survive unfavorable conditions during development, physiological adult contexts, and disease. One paradigmatic case of dormancy is diapause, w...

(2/4) We discovered that Nodal/Smad2 signaling, a branch of the TGF-β pathway, is essential to sustain this paused state in embryonic stem cells and embryos. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fantastic work from Xi and Qi-long! Chicken ES cells will take classic chicken embryology to a new level.

In Preprints: A new preprint curation initiative from Development

In preprints: gastruloids get (a)head

Wilhelmus A. Brouwer @wesselbrouwer.bsky.social and
Luca Braccioli @bracciolilab.bsky.social discuss the #preprint by Balaskas et al. "An advanced head-to-tail mouse embryo model with hypoxia-mediated neural patterning”

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

In our “Meet the first author” interview series, we take a look behind the scenes of science. This time we spoke with Francesca Rossi, first author of a recent collaborative paper in Nucleic Acids Research from the Kinkley Lab.

👉 Read the interview here: www.molgen.mpg.de/2025-09-22-m...

Our latest preprint! Into morphogenesis, Yap, ECM, signaling, vertex models, feedbacks/robustness? There is something here for everyone. We discovered a positive feedback loop that extends inner ear canals, and a built-in mechanism that shuts it down when morphogenesis is done. tinyurl.com/464wsjhd

A human-specific regulatory mechanism revealed in a pre-implantation model - Nature Genetic manipulation of blastoids reveals the role of recently emerged transposable elements and genes in human development.

This paper uncovers that HERVK LTR5Hs, a hominoid-specific retrovirus, act as epiblast enhancers with a crucial function in human pre-implantation development - stunning!
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🚨JOB ALERT🚨

FRIENDS PLEASE SPREAD and RT

We are building a small expert team within the @bokelab.bsky.social at @crg.eu @prbb.org to investigate fundamental questions in oocyte cell biology, focusing on how proteostasis regulation influences dormancy and fertility.

See below 2 calls👇

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 🧵 👇

I am excited to announce that we are looking for a Lab Manager @fmiscience.bsky.social in Basel. If you want to be part of a growing team investigating development and tissue formation, and are enthusiastic about helping set up a new lab, please check out the role:

www.fmi.ch/education-ca...

Congrats, Julia. Very happy for you. All the very best.

Out today in @nature.com: Together with the Honigmann, Shevchenko, Drobot and Hof labs, we present a general workflow for imaging the localization and transport of individual lipids in cells and mapping their metabolism.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Metabolic regulation of key developmental events during mammalian embryogenesis - Nature Cell Biology This Review discusses the intricate relationship between metabolism and embryogenesis, highlighting the orchestration of key developmental processes by metabolites and signalling molecules that provid...

Anyone here interested in #metabolism in #devbio ?
We recently published a Review article by Jin Zhang & co discussing the relationship between metabolism and #embryogenesis. Enjoy the read! :D
👉https://rdcu.be/eADIT
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Beyond classic stress signalling: how mitochondrial stress softens the cell nucleus and alters cellular identity A University of Cologne research team has discovered that cells in high-energy-demanding tissues respond to mitochondrial dysfunction in a surprising way. Instead of shutting down, cells adjust their ...

What happens when #mitochondria fail in high-energy tissues? Cells adjust their metabolism and alter the mechanics of the nucleus! Read more on the discovery by Dr. Harshita Kaul from the Trifunovic Lab in Nature Metabolism.

➡️ uni.koeln/QZURH

#CellStress #NatureMetabolism @unicologne.bsky.social

1 month to abstract deadline for the first cell biology of the nucleus meeting at @embl.org in many years - organised by the stellar @luskinglab.bsky.social @sarawickstrom.bsky.social Tom Quail & Simone Koehler

Tons of open slots, invited and selected speakers all get 20 mins ❤️

#EESNucleus

Lamin B1 and LAP2β resist cytoskeletal force to maintain lamin A/C meshwork organization and preserve nuclear integrity | Molecular Biology of the Cell The nuclear lamins are extremely long-lived proteins in most cell types. As a consequence, lamin function cannot be effectively dissected with temporal precision using standard knock-down approaches. ...

The nuclear lamina strengthens the nucleus and organizes the genome. So what happens when you acutely degrade it in living cells? Not what we thought! (1/n)
www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/...

Intracellular mechanics and organelle mechanobiology Mechanobiology is an interdisciplinary field that emerges at the cross-section of biology, physics and engineering. It aims to understand how living cells, tissues and animals sense and respond to me…

Announcing a new @embo.org Workshop on "Intracellular mechanics and organelle mechanobiology" that we are organizing with Michael Krieg and Verena Ruprecht at @icfo.eu (Barcelona) on 16-20 February, 2026. Please, repost and spread the word! 🙏 #EMBOmechanobio

meetings.embo.org/event/26-org...

Indian summer

⚠️ I am really excited to share the work of Anastasios Balaskas, an excellent PhD candidate in the lab, with the wider world. Tasos made a significant advance: generating a stem cell-based embryo model that contains both posterior and anterior neural tissues of the late-stage gastrulating embryo.

Road to Research: Q&A with Vignesh Babu, Scientist in Custom Protein… "Working at the Stowers Institute has provided me with a wealth of new knowledge about the diverse array of research organisms and the fascinating…

Meet Vignesh Babu, Scientist in Custom Protein Resources in this #RoadToResearch Q&A!

"Working at the Stowers Institute has provided me with a wealth of new knowledge about the diverse array of research organisms and the fascinating proteins they possess."

Read more: bit.ly/40eqRNA

Proteostasis in cellular dormancy: lessons from yeast to oocytes Cellular dormancy is characterized by a prolonged, reversible cell cycle arrest and absence of growth. Dormancy allows organisms to endure unfavorable…

How do dormant cells keep their proteostasis in check?
@gzaffagnini.bsky.social & our PhD student Stephanie Rosswag take a deep dive in our featured review @cp-trendsbiochem.bsky.social
Don’t miss it! - EB
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Very important @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social‬ report #mechanochemical signalling control fate transitions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ wide/significant implications. Perhaps the clearest indication so far of HOW #NotInTheGenes cell interactions mechanical pattern gene expression
#MustRead

In @nature.com Yaotian Zhang and @henriniskanen.bsky.social from the Hnisz Lab discovered a micropeptide, the "Killswitch," which alters the physical state of biomolecules in condensates. This tool solidifies dynamic, liquid-like droplets, affecting their function.
--> www.molgen.mpg.de/4884827

Congratulations neighbors!
We are very happy to be part of this story and looking forward to the future work we'll be doing with the Hnisz lab 😉

Maternal iron deficiency causes male-to-female sex reversal in mouse embryos - Nature Iron-deficient conditions in pregnant mice can cause XY mouse embryos to develop female rather than male genitalia, revealing that iron metabolism has a role in determining male sex in mice.

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

Dev bio is amazing !!

Very excited to share our latest work in #MolCell showing NPM1 stabilizing the association of nucleolus associated domains (NADs) and recruiting G9a to establish their repressive chromatin states. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Distribution of haploid chromosomes into separate nuclei in two pathogenic fungi Nuclei define eukaryotes, enabling macromolecular compartmentalization and cellular regulation. Each nucleus is believed to contain one or more haploid sets of chromosomes (1N). However, we discovered...

Wow: check it out; these fungi distribute their chromosomes across different nuclei!

Normally each nucleus has a complete set of all chromosomes.

Distribution of haploid chromosomes into separate nuclei in two pathogenic fungi | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Post-gastrulation amnioids as a stem cell-derived model of human extra-embryonic development An embryonic stem cell-based 3D model that accurately recapitulates the size, morphology, and functional features of the human amnion at 4 weeks, termed the post-gastrulation amnioid (PGA), is develop...

Beautiful work from @santoslab.bsky.social

A 3D model of human amnion from hESCs

These recapitulate amniotic sac development, revealing GATA3 as key amniogenesis driver & autoregulatory BMP/Wnt feedback loops

And check out the size of them in the video

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Cell cycle duration determines oncogenic transformation capacity - Nature Total cell cycle duration is a key hallmark of cancer initiation, and determines whether defects in apoptosis, senescence, immune surveillance, angiogenesis, DNA repair, polarity and proliferation lea...

new out in Nature www.nature.com/articles/s41...