Kate Cavanaugh

🚨 Link up with me at #Cellbio2025 ! 🚨 Excited to present the majority of my postdoc work in the Physical Cell Biology from Molecules to Organisms Minisymposium. Thanks to the organizers for putting together such an exciting session 🤩

Featuring @katecavanaugh.bsky.social @yusuke-mori.bsky.social @fengtongji.bsky.social @liamjrussell99.bsky.social Gavin Schlissel, June Ho Hwan, Yuxuan Rain Xiong, Rohit Joshi, and myself!

Sun 10AM–12PM, Room 120 (The app is missing the first few talks, but I assure you talks start right at 10AM!)

If you're at #cellbio2025, @atmolines.bsky.social Hernan Garcia and I invite you to attend our Minisymposium “Physical Cell Biology from Molecules to Organisms” for incredible talks on epigenetic mechanical memory, viscoelasticity, cortical flows, morphogenesis, tissue wetting, size scaling, et al!

Definitely did not write this book...

SAVE THE DATE! Stoked to organize the 2026 Santa Cruz Developmental Biology Meeting with @rashmi-priya.bsky.social, @lowelab.bsky.social, and Shelbi Russell. Come learn about Biomedicine, Biomechanics, and the Biosphere, August 24-28, 2026. Registration dates, etc., coming soon! Please RT

I'm thrilled to be able to share this new paper from post-doc Camilla Teng @xsciteng.bsky.social and our collaborators in the Leslie-Clarkson lab @emorygenetics.bsky.social on mechanisms of tissue fusion and cleft lip url: rupress.org/jcb/article/...

🔬🍀

A timelapse movie (unpublished data) from the lab.

In the movie, the nucleus is moving towards the base of the polarized root hair cell.

A versatile cohesion manipulation system probes female reproductive age-related egg aneuploidy - Nature Aging To study pathways that lead to aneuploidy during aging, the authors provide a system that enables cohesion protein depletion in mouse oocytes, mimicking effects that occur during aging. They uncover a...

We built a targeted protein degradation–based system to mimic reproductive age-related aneuploidy in young eggs - revealing how chromosome errors associated with female infertility arise with age. 🧬✨
With @jiyeonleem.bsky.social and our team at Yale MCDB.

Read: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Sorry wrong tag .. I definitely did NOT write this book

📣 New preprint! Stoked to share a fantastic collaboration with @campaslab.bsky.social!

We discover a unique mammalian mechanism for body axis elongation using mouse and human gastruloids, and confirm central findings in mouse embryos.

Check out the 🧵 👇

@mpi-cbg.de @poldresden.bsky.social

Thrilled to announce the launch of my lab
@cri-utsw.bsky.social at UTSW this January!

We will explore how cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, focusing on membrane mechanics to reveal how tension and signaling work together to shape cell behavior.

Induction of menstruation in mice reveals the regulation of menstrual shedding During menstruation, an inner layer of the endometrium is selectively shed, while an outer, progenitor-containing layer is preserved to support repeated regeneration. Progress in understanding this co...

I’m thrilled to share my postdoc work and the first paper from the McKinley Lab! 🎉
@karalmckinley.bsky.social
We built the first transgenic model of menstruation in mice.
We used it to uncover how the endometrium organizes and sheds during menstruation. 🧪
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧵

Happy Fluorescence Friday with this new preprint 👀

New job, new preprint! We found that embryo implantation can be understood as active wetting! Embryos from older mothers have trouble implanting because they are too contractile and viscous. Check out the wonderful thread (and movies!) by @katecavanaugh.bsky.social.

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

Thank you!!! This was a fun paper to do/write. But Aren't we all just really really really old embryos anyway? 🤣😅

Thanks Vicky!! I hope you're doing well!

Thanks Rikki! I hope all is well with you! 💪

Thanks for the kind words, mark!!

Thanks Vinny! I hope you and yours are doing well!!!

Amazingly, yes! Here, we indexed embryos, calculated compaction metrics, and selected Normal and Accelerated tempo’d embryos for later implantation assays. We find compaction metrics correlate with ultimate implantation potential – for both aged and young maternal conditions.

Well, we also find increased contractility in the aged embryo also correlates with faster compaction at the 8-cell stage. Could this be a possible metric to see which ones will implant?

But contractility tunes cell-cell adhesion (limiting spreading) and cell-substrate adhesion (promoting spreading). Aged embryos show higher blastocyst surface tension AND higher spreading forces via Traction Force Microscopy. Weird… So how can we explain reduced spreading?

Using mouse embryos, we visualize implantation in vitro to see what’s wrong in embryo development w/ advanced maternal age. In vitro implantation assays show aged embryos do not implant as efficiently.

Thanks for following along. We hope this info can be used to improve IVF procedures to increase success rates for women of all ages. Please like/RT. @eshre.bsky.social #eshrejc @bwfund.bsky.social @hhmi.org #reproductivehealth #reproductivehealth #devbiol

We stand on the shoulders of giants! Many other groups have looked at compaction metrics - like the extent of embryo "flattening" as a way to show viability. But we hoped that we could fill the gap as to whether compaction itself correlates with later implantation potential 💪

we heavily used the Spirochrome dyes for this paper!

A mechanical origin for implantation defects in embryos from aged females https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679218v1

A profuse thank you to all collaborators - Diana Laird, @pwoakes.bsky.social , and @ricardalert.bsky.social – whose hard work really elevated our findings. Thank you to Orion, who gave me incredible freedom to explore this new research in the lab.

a close up of a person 's face with the words `` i want to be forever young '' . ALT: a close up of a person 's face with the words `` i want to be forever young '' .

And finally, can we rejuvenate embryos to restore developmental potential? We hope yes – by tuning embryonic contractility we may find the embryonic fountain of youth to improve fertility if this holds true for human embryos.

a little girl in a red dress is standing in front of a scale .. ALT: a little girl in a red dress is standing in front of a scale ..

What this also suggests is something out of Willy Wonka – we can use early compaction metrics to find the good and bad embryos. Talk about an Eggdicator…