Pawel Burkhardt

Epigenomic and transcriptomic analyses reveal cnidocyte specialization in a sea anemone Cnidarians, including corals, hydras, jellyfish, and sea anemones, possess specialized stinging cells called cnidocytes that function in prey capture and defense. These cells represent a striking evol...

1/3 🔥🚨 We have a new @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social #preprint from our lab! Itamar Kozlovski, an excellent PhD student, established CUT&TAG in #Nematostella. He used this technique to map the transcriptional activation mark H3K27ac in two stinging cell populations
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Incredible pictures by @alexandrejan.bsky.social, ctenophore whisperer in the @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social lab 😍 Happy belated ctenophore day! 🌈

Male CNS Connectome A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

Amazing work by @thibautbrunet.bsky.social and his lab! I can’t stress enough how significant a development this is for Choanoflagellate research and it has been revolutionary for our work!

Latest from ours: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

This is two stories in one: a case study/cautionary tale on developing genetic tools in new organisms, and the first hint at a gene regulatory network for choanoflagellate multicellular development (which turn out to involve a Hippo/YAP/ECM loop!) A 🧵

Happy Ctenophore Day!
These glowing ocean drifters look like jellyfish but aren’t! They’re comb jellies, shimmering creatures that light up the sea with rows of beating cilia 💙🌈
Which species can you identify? 👀 Most are raised in @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social lab
#CtenophoreDay #CombJelly #Ctenophore

Drawing of various Ctenophore anatomies showing the diversity of the phylum. center/front, top left, and right are lobate ctenophores, center/back is a beroid or nuda ctenophore, center/right is a cydippid or tentacled ctenophore, and bottom/left is a benthic ctenophore

A drawing of the Blood belly comb jelly ctenophore (comb jelly) which is known for its stricking red coloration that helps it live in the deep sea

Happy Ctenophore day! Its a perfect day to celebrate such a small yet beautifully diverse phyla that comes in a wide array of shapes and colors. #Ctenophoreday

A spherical comb jelly floating against a dark background, with its tentacles deployed, tentilla (side branches) fanned out. There is a number 1 above the body and number 2 below the body. Photo by S. Haddock taken around 1990.

For CTENOPHORE DAY, a little survey:
Which end of this fishing Pleurobrachia is the mouth on? Please just "vote" in the comments — no definitive answers. 🦑🧪🌊

P.S. this is one of my earliest #ctenophore photos, shot on film in a home-built kreisel.

P.P.S. Legit data-gathering for a future paper.

HAPPY CTENOPHORE DAY (part II).

A full bucket of ctenophores for Ctenophore day - time to shimmer🌈🌊✨

Please watch till end: Mnemiopsis & Pleurobrachia included.

Alexandre @alexandrejan.bsky.social filmed and caught this ctenophore at the same time @msarscentre.bsky.social #ctenophores #GoPro

Temp: 14.1°C, Salinity: 33.9‰

HAPPY CTENOPHORE DAY (part I).

The fjords around Bergen are full with Mnemiopsis right now. Movie by the amazing @alexandrejan.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social #ctenophores #GoPro

A graphic that reads Happy Ctenophore Day in glowing pink text twice between three rows of different ctenophore species. The top row is lobate ctenophores including Bolinopsis microptera, Leucothea pulchra, Mnemiopsis leidy, and the bloody belly comb jelly Lampocteis. The second row has three different Beroe species. The lowest row has Pleurobrachia bachei, Dryodora glandiformis, red-x, and Euplokamis dunlapae.

Happy Ctenophore Day!
🐙🦑🧪

If you’re applying to your dream lab for an internship/PhD/postdoc, always send a second email 1-2 weeks after the first one if you don’t hear back.

I promise we will be grateful rather than annoyed. My email inbox is a disaster and I’m quite junior - and very few of us have secretarial support

Here it is! Postdoctoral position to identify the progenitors sensory organs in the regenerating legs of Parhyale

apply here: www.averof-lab.org/pages/tracman

1/3

Nanotubes everywhere between neurons! A bit skeptical about these "dendrite-dendrite nanotubes" from a phalloidin staining in culture, but let's read on… www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A shiny choanoflagellate chain

Seems that we have a new reporter strain (pic: @jujumathieu.bsky.social)

Now Hiring! Whitney Laboratory Assistant/Associate Professor in Marine Bioscience
Apply & More Info - explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...
We seek a creative, collaborative scientist whose research harnesses or advances cutting-edge tools. Please help spread the word & reach out with any questions!

Breaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt

Comb jelly season has started in Bergen, Norway! 🌈🍂🧪

Pathway to Independence: a forecast for the future of developmental biology ABSTRACT. In 2022, Development launched its Pathway to Independence (PI) programme, aimed at supporting postdocs as they transition to their first independent position. In 2025, we welcome our third c...

Meet the 2025 cohort of @dev-journal.bsky.social Pathway to Independence fellows

Read about the scientific visions of eight dev bio post-docs entering the academic job market

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

Out @natcomms.nature.com:
our work on how the ❤️-supporting pericardium forms & acts in pediatric heart conditions.🎈🫀

Expanding our preprint & with our first HCR (thx to @thelovelylab.bsky.social!).

Congrats all! #devbio #zebrafish #CHD @cupediatrics.bsky.social @cudevbio.bsky.social
rdcu.be/eIJm5

Day 30 - Dream. The final day of #sciartseptember. My long-term dream has always been to create a series of illustrated guides that would help identify the various jellies and jellyfish of the would. Creating illustrations like the ones below to accurately ID species.

Another season has started as well. We now find many different ctenophores in Byfjorden, a fjord that runs into the city center of Bergen.

Here the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi: it uses a row of cilia called comb plates to swim. When hit by light, they create shimmering rainbows along their bodies.

🌟 Thrilled to share that my lab’s first publication is now out in @natmetabolism.nature.com. Congrats to the team 🎉

🧠 We discovered that neurons use endogenous fatty acids as an energy fuel, challenging long-standing models of sugars being the exclusive energy source for neurons. 1/3

Beautiful aurora last night. Season has officially started 🤩. These were taken handheld with my phone, 3s exposure with no editing at around 22.30.

Fantastic presentation by @malinkjosavik.bsky.social at the Tutzing basal metazoan workshop 👏 She shared her work on starvation and metabolism in Nematostella, conducted in collaboration between the @prhsteinmetz.bsky.social lab and the Dept of Biomedicine @unibergen.bsky.social ✨

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

Happy to share the Biodiversity Cell Atlas white paper, out today in @nature.com. We look at the possibilities, challenges, and potential impacts of molecularly mapping cells across the tree of life.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Explaining sea squirt development to the public? Challenge accepted! Our team had a great time at the #forskningsdagene science fair over the weekend. We met visitors of all ages who shared our excitement for science, and went back to the lab inspired and energized 🤩✨