Amoyel lab

Flyer for the ‘Metabolism in Development & Physiology’ online seminar series. Session on Thursday 11 December 2025, 16:00 CET, featuring talks by Heather Christofk (UCLA) on ‘Metabolic Transitions in Development’ and Yuanlingzi Tian (University of Glasgow) on ‘Metabolic Crosstalk Supports Intestinal Stem Cell Adaptation During Tissue Regeneration’, with Zoom link and sign-up information

We’re back with the Metabolism in Development & Physiology online seminar series 🎉

Thu 11 Dec 2025, 16:00 CET

Speakers:
Heather Christofk (Professor, UCLA)

Yuanlingzi Tian (PostDoc, University of Glasgow)

Reminder to apply - talk applications accepted continuously, there is no deadline. We will be seeking speakers throughout all of next year, so if you have a story on metabolism in development you're excited to share, here's the perfect place:

Our lab is actively looking for posdocs and there is NOW an Open Call for Postdoc contracts (3 years) here: www.aei.gob.es/en/announcem...

Sign-up form - Metabolism in Development and Physiology Seminar Series Please fill out your details below if you are interested in receiving updates on the Metabolism in Development and Physiology seminar series. This seminar series will take place every second Thursday ...

and a reminder to sign up for the mailing list here to get the Zoom link directly into your inbox:
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Excited about your research on #metabolism in #development? We are too! Send in your abstracts to give a talk in these seminars.

Mountain view from IMBB

Thanks @scentinel.bsky.social and @imbb-forth.bsky.social for the opportunity - it was an honour to be invited by the PhD students and postdocs and to share the stage with such great junior scientists!
Thoroughly enjoyed my visit, from the great science to the (no less great) views from IMBB!

New PhD opportunity studying oocyte biology. Excited about this new direction in the lab.

🔜Only one week to go 🎉! Looking forward to hosting the inaugural talks of our “Metabolism in Development & Physiology” seminar series. Join us by registering here: forms.gle/Y8QzucogKKrZ...

Please sign up for the mailing list here to get the Zoom link:
forms.gle/Y8QzucogKKrZ...

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.

Thanks for writing this - all of us in development need to hear this!

And if you're at @edrc2025.bsky.social, come check out Alicia Donoghue present this work in the signalling session tomorrow (Friday) 15:00!

Morphogen and juxtacrine signalling dynamically integrate to specify cell fates with single-cell resolution Morphogen gradients guide tissue patterning but do not act in isolation. How they integrate with other signalling modalities, like juxtacrine signalling, and how these integrations influence pattern r...

Interested in morphogens and how they can robustly specifiy different cell types with single-cell resolution?
Check out this preprint combining experiments and modelling by our colleagues and partners in crime @ucl-cdb.bsky.social:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fantastic meeting! Thanks @events.embl.org for hosting, @embo.org for funding this and to organisers and all attendees for thought-provoking and exciting science!

Looking forward to this! Great chance to catch up with everyone and all the amazing Drosophila research going on!

Thanks! It's been a really fun project and between your work and ours, highlights how conserved male germ cell biology is...

Programmed meiotic errors facilitate dichotomous sperm production in the silkworm, Bombyx mori The goal of meiosis is typically to produce haploid gametes (eggs or sperm). Failure to do so is catastrophic for fertility and offspring health. However, Lepidopteran (moths and butterflies) males pr...

So excited to share this preprint from the Rosin lab in collaboration with the Hawley lab and @eelcotromer.bsky.social on moth spermatogenesis! We investigate the meiotic errors that occur during the formation of apyrene sperm (that have no DNA) in silkworms!

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

Lovely work by @martinestermann.bsky.social and colleagues from the Capel lab! Together with our recent work (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...), this really makes a strong case that lactate is crucial to supporting male germ cells in vivo - from flies to mammals.

😵‍💫

Plenty more in the manuscript - read it here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
This is the work of @diegosainzdelamaza.bsky.social, started by Holly Jefferson a few years ago, with help from undergraduate students, Sonia and Celine.
And thanks to so many colleagues for advice, help and reagents!

Finally, we ask how the soma ensures it produces enough lactate to support the germline. We show it's a very delicate balance and the somatic cells are careful not to use pyruvate in their own mitochondria; in other words, they exclusively dedicate the glycolytic pathway to support the germline.

One for the 🪰 nerds: we found a previously uncharacterised transporter that mediates lactate transport from somatic cells to the germline, so we get to name it. We called it milkman 🥛.

Excitingly, germ cells consume lactate (but don't produce it) - knocking down the enzyme that interconverts lactate and pyruvate, Ldh, in germ cells, results in lactate accumulation (contrary to the somatic cells which produce lactate)

So what do the somatic cells provide? We used fluorescent reporters for metabolites and we see that they produce lactate. Knocking down the enzyme that produces lactate from the glycolytic product pyruvate, Ldh, in somatic cells causes germ cells to die.

If we block glycolysis in somatic cells, we find that germ cells start dying. There's always some death in the germline, but almost twice as much when we knock down glycolytic genes in somatic cells. Knock down in the germ cells themselves has no effect - they don't break down sugars themselves.

We show that somatic cells of the testis take up circulating sugars and break them down through glycolysis.
But germ cells don't express the genes needed for glycolysis.

So where do germ cells get their nutrients from? And how does the soma make sure they get enough?
That's what we answer here.

It has been known for a long time that male germ cells are enveloped by somatic cells and lose access to nutrients from blood circulation. Not just in mammals, but even in flies (where blood is called haemolymph) as shown by @tanentzapflab.bsky.social.

Somatic cells compartmentalise their metabolism to sustain germ cell survival To ensure success in reproduction, organisms dedicate substantial resources to supporting the germline. In testes, somatic gonadal cells form a barrier that isolates germ cells from circulating nutrie...

🆕🧪‼️
New lab preprint!
We study how germ cells (the cells that give rise to gametes, in this case sperm) are supported by somatic (non-germ) cells of the gonad. This matters for our understanding of reproduction - without germ cell development, animals are sterile.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

yes - you should talk to Inês in Vil's lab, she's really the one who went through it all.