Jordan Shivers

The comb jelly or sea walnut (Mnemiopsis leidyi) undergoes a Ctenophore-specific cleavage program that is characterized as unipolar and holoblastic (total cleavage). This offspring came from a specimen found in Eel Pond in Woods Hole, USA. Credit to 2017 Embryology Course at @mblscience.bsky.social.

Check out our new preprint! We show that tension drives mixing of phase separated membranes!

Hitachi High-Technologies An abalone shell made up of 0.5 µm thick tiles of calcium carbonate, or chalk, cemented together by a protein coating. The whole structure is 3,000 times more resistant to fracturing than a crystal of calcium carbonate alone. This property comes from the positive charge of the protein coating that binds to the negative charge of the hexagonal calcium carbonate tiles. This binding is weak enough that the layers can slide slightly apart to absorb the energy of a blow. Material scientists interested in biomimicry are seeking to replicate this structure to create tougher materials.

What looks like a topological map for a TTRPG is in fact an SEM image of an abalone shell.

While shells are primarily made of calcium carbonate, there's a protein matrix that makes shell '3,000 times more resistant to fracturing than a crystal of calcium carbonate alone.'

(📷: Hitachi Hi Tech)

MesoMem: A mesoscale membrane model based on an additive potential Bridging the gap between atomistic detail and continuum mechanics is a central challenge in modeling biological membranes, particularly for mesoscopic phenomena spanning large length and time scales. ...

New preprint from our group: MesoMem: A mesoscale membrane model based on an additive potential on arxiv.org/abs/2602.24123. Using an additive potential combining positional and orientational terms, we get a stable and robust membrane model. Great work of PhD student Pietro Sillano.

Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues and Organs | Quanta Magazine Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can later withstand immense forces.

Sometimes, the only way to build back up is to let everything fall apart. This is certainly true at the cellular level. www.quantamagazine.org/break-it-to-...

The paper is out in Small 🎉🎊: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
See the thread summary below 👇

We had covered the history of traction force microscopy (TFM) earlier:
bsky.app/profile/epim...

But what about applying TFM into more physiologically relevant systems, such as those in 3D?

I am @barrasa-fano.bsky.social and I'll be your guide through this thread on #3DTractionForceMicroscopy.

Alexandre’s manuscript, “Polymerization from Lipid Membranes,” is now published in Biomacromolecules!

Congratulations to Alexandre and the team!

The paper describes how to grow polymer brushes directly from one side of lipid bilayers by incorporating an ATRP initiator

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

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

Pivoting colloidal assemblies exhibit mechanical metamaterial behaviour Nature - A method is described for the manufacture of pivoting colloidal assemblies comprising rotating diamond and rotating triangle geometries that show tunable folding and unfolding by thermal...

I am very excited that our latest work is now out in @nature.com: Brownian mechanical metamaterials! Great work by Julio Melio, in collaboration with Martin van Hecke and Silke Henkes: rdcu.be/e5H86!

Böhringer, D., Cóndor, M., Bischof, L. et al. Dynamic traction force measurements of migrating immune cells in 3D biopolymer matrices. Nat. Phys. 20, 1816–1823 (2024). #EpithelialMechanics
buff.ly/KSRo2JM

A crowd of marine embryos self-assembles into a living solid Nature Physics - Marine embryos are usually studied in isolation. But when starfish embryos are in a crowd, they self-assemble into living solids with unexpected dynamics, revealing how simple...

What happens when marine embryos are crowded instead of isolated?

They become materials.

Honored to write a @natphys.nature.com News & Views on excitable living solids discovered by Prof. Fakhri and colleagues at @mit.edu 😀

N&V: rdcu.be/e5gLm
Paper: nature.com/articles/s41...

Blood vessel development and lumenization in a zebrafish embryo. Credit to Dr. Kazuhide Shaun Okuda @latrobeuni.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

Cell body getting taken for a ride in this early stage neuron. Microtubules🔵 and Actin🟣 labeled and imaged for 16hr on a Zeiss LSM880. Happy #FluorescenceFriday

I'm very happy to see this nice discussion. The cytosol and crowding are a big deal in cell biology, but it's still not uncommon to see cells treated as though they were a bag of dilute, well-mixed molecules...

Zaza’s main PhD work just came out in a journal! Macrophage cell nuclei physically sense 50 um/s fast osmotic shock waves coming from wounds to mediate rapid vessel permeabilization and serum exudation - one of the hallmarks of acute inflammation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here's a beautiful #microscopy image from our PoL Photo Competition 📸

👨‍🔬 🔬©️ Image taken by Yogishree Arabinda Panda, PhD student in the Fischer-Friedrich group @fischerfriedriclab.bsky.social

🔍 Caption: A SEM micrograph of a mitotically arrested HeLa cell with visible filopodia membrane reservoirs

New preprint: “When lipids embrace RNA”

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Using multiscale simulations (🍸 #Martini + constant-pH MD), we show that:

• Local pKa ≠ global pKa
• Endosomal escape is limited by persistent protonation.

#LNP #MolecularDynamics

Letian Chen, Luke K. Davis: Reentrance in a Hamiltonian flocking model https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11104 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11104 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.11104

Delighted to share our latest preprint "Filopodia-mediated trans-endocytosis"

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Work driven by many people including Hanna, Marcela, Sujan, Marie-Catherine, Anna and Monika. Fantastic collaboration with Johanna Englund, Emilia Peuhu, and Eija Jokitalo

Mutual information and task-relevant latent dimensionality Estimating the dimensionality of the latent representation needed for prediction -- the task-relevant dimension -- is a difficult, largely unsolved problem with broad scientific applications. We cast ...

New preprint!
arxiv.org/abs/2602.08105

We use mutual information to find the shared dimensionality of shared latent space between two high-dimensional variables. Turning inference into optimization, we use it to figure out dofs in movies and critical scaling in Ising!

Long in the making, but happy to present the Chlamydomonas chlororibosome!
Cryo-ET🔬reveals a large new domain on the small subunit, built from multiple extensions in conserved ribosomal proteins.
bioRxiv 📖: shorturl.at/q44tG
This suggests greater chlororibosome diversity than expected!
1/n 🧵

#FluorescenceFriday

Jost, Schweizer et al. @ Cuello lab found that a mutation linked to aortic aneurysmas led to distorted actin #cytoskeleton in VSMCs #mechanobiology

New collab @cellcommlab.bsky.social by @jboixcampos.bsky.social🔥

Full www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#microscopy #cell 🧪🔬

There was so much to unpack with this data, we teamed up with the marvellous @margotriggi.bsky.social to help explain what we think is going on. (Please also check out our model of central apparatus assembly here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...)

Babesia microti (purple) parasites preparing to invade a red blood cell (red) coated in fibrin (yellow). CREDIT: Amy Apgar

Red blood cells typically don’t move independently, but 1% of those infected by the protozoan parasite Babesia microti show clear directional movement, possibly allowing the parasite to move through the blood and infect new red blood cells. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/L96h50Y9uTK

Computational design of blue melanin with peptide motif scaffolding

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Computational design of blue melanin with peptide motif scaffolding [new]
...scaffolding enabled new blue & other melanin colors by guiding Y-peptide polymerization for controlled length, achieving tight packing and water solubility.

Ripken, Plainer, Lied, Frank, Unke, Chmiela, No\'e, M\"uller: Learning Hamiltonian Flow Maps: Mean Flow Consistency for Large-Timestep Molecular Dynamics https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22123 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22123 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22123

CaMKII nucleates an osmotic protein supercomplex to induce cellular bleb expansion - The EMBO Journal Blebs are membrane protrusions formed when localized regions of the plasma membrane detach from the actin cortex, enabling outward expansion driven by intracellular pressure. These structures play cri...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Neutrophils are white blood cells that circulate in our blood. When they reach capillaries, they compress & fill these vessels. Derek Power et al via:👇👇
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

@urneuroscience.bsky.social @flaumeye.bsky.social @urochestersmd.bsky.social @cvsuor.bsky.social @uofrbme.bsky.social

How do we get such an ordered structure after the chaos of laser ablation? We decided to investigate this problem quantitatively by using a Cellular Potts Model (CPM).
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