Thomas Lecuit

Horizon Europe 2028 - 2034: twice bigger, simpler, faster and more impactful Research and innovation news alert: As part of the next long-term EU budget 2028-2034, the Commission is proposing to double the budget of the research and innovation framework programme to €175 billi...

Very promising news on the next seven-year EU budget, with a proposed substantial increase for Horizon Europe including the ERC.

We are analysing the other parts of this proposal in more detail.

@Vonderleyen @EZaharievaEU

research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-res...

🕘 Retour sur l'année du Collège de France ! 
🙏 Qu’est-ce que l’information #biologique ? Dans son cours, le Pr @thomaslecuit.bsky.social mêle sciences biologiques, physiques et computationnelles pour comprendre la morphogenèse.
👉 https://f.mtr.cool/kyovixjugn

An active torque dipole across tissue layers drives avian left-right symmetry breaking Unlike in mice, frogs, and fish, left-right (L/R) body axis formation in avian embryos does not arise from the chiral beat of cilia. Instead, a counter-clockwise tissue rotation around Hensen′ node, t...

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I am excited to finally share our work on avian left/right symmetry breaking with you. We reveal a tissue-scale active torque dipole generated at the Hensen’s node, thanks to crazy experiments by Julia @juliapfanzelter.bsky.social and some analysis by me.
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Patrick Breier and Claire Bertet doing some stretching…

Marseille MUCEM and Cassis Cape Canaille 🤩

Congratulations to all the new members! 👏👏👏

Sham Tlili, winner of the CNRS 2025 bronze medal - IBDM | Institut de Biologie du Développement de Marseille A distinction that rewards a promising and already fruitful scientific career.

🥇Sham Tlili has been awarded the CNRS 2025 Bronze Medal! She studies how physical forces shape living tissues by using mouse stem cell models known as gastruloids. A unique blend of physics & biology.

🔗 Read more: www.ibdm.univ-amu.fr/sham-tlili-w...

Symposium @crick.ac.uk today celebrating the life of David Ish-Horowicz. Much missed dear colleague and friend.

RFK Jr. says US won’t donate to global vaccine effort Kennedy ripped into Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in a video address at its pledging summit.

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.
www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

I am very sorry to hear this. I am very confident this will be funded next time!

This was a truly exciting talk!
🤩. Physical-chemistry of signalling at its best: T cell receptor signalling is really amazing in terms of precision and sensitivity. Kinetic proofreading, kinetic phase transition and amplification. Thank you for visiting us 🙏🏼

At #ShapingLife3 conference with Mounia @laghalab.bsky.social, my first summer intern 22 or 23 years ago 😎. Cap Canaille in background.

# ShapingLife3

Exciting science in Cassis in a wonderful location! 🤩
Group discussions on carrier development with students, postdocs, Jean-Léon Maître & Bruno Hudry by the sea… 🌊😎☀️

These are fantastic talks! What a fun and inspiring break from paper writing this week. Thank you for posting.

The talks from the symposium on Information processing at the Collège de France are also available on the Youtube channel. Link to the 1st Talk here, others easy to find:
tinyurl.com/2emnr8rh
Talks were really inspirational and prompted exciting discussions among participants and speakers
Enjoy 🤩

This was a truly exciting talk from Aurelien Roux @rouxlab.bsky.social from Univ. Geneva 👏👏. From his landmark work on membranes to tissues now, the continuing theme is the role of geometry, topology and curvature in morphogenesis. Thanks for visiting us 🤩

New preprint from the lab!
👇

Second preprint from the lab in a week!

This time led by Aurelien.

Combining live imaging, quantitative image analysis and perturbations, he clarifies the mechanisms leading to primitive induction.

👇

Many cells during development are exposed to caspase activation and yet survive. Why some die and not others ? We found out that the memory of previous caspase activation bias significantly later death comitment and bias death distribution and single cell decision
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Experimental embryology postdoc available in my lab at the @biology.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk working on the evolution of vertebral counts. Reach out if you’re passionate about EvoDevo, enjoy lab work and microscopy and are into or could get into cichlid fishes. Deadline on the 16th June. Please share!

Seattle’s Allen Institute launches ‘moonshot’ to create new approach to cell biology research A 75-person team at Seattle's Allen Institute is embarking on a 10-year project called CellScapes to devise a mathematical language to capture cell behavior.

www.geekwire.com/2025/seattle...

It was also a very good time for discussions in nice restaurants and bars 😊

The symposium at the College de France yesterday on Biological information was wonderful. High level presentations and discussions among speakers and participants.
Videos will be online soon!🤩
Huge thanks to the speakers 🙏🏼🙏🏼

Our colleague Prof. Benny (Ben Zion) Shilo passed away this morning @WeizmannScience . Benny worked at the forefront of world science in the study of molecular and developmental genetics. Among other things, he won the A.M.T. Prize in the field of genetics in 2013. He was also a great explainer of science, a kind teacher - and an artist photographer with a sharp eye and a sensitive soul. Benny, we will miss you very much. May his memory be blessed.

Our field has lost an amazing scientist, mentor, and old friend. Benny, along with Mike Hoffman, had a brilliant idea in the early 1980s. The first oncogenes were being cloned and they realized if we wanted to understand their roles in cancer, we needed to understand their normal function 1/n 🧪

Please RT. If you are in Paris, see announcement of 4 lectures by @stephenquake.bsky.social at @collegedefrance.bsky.social on « Understanding the mysteries of the cell », hosted by colleagues Edith Heard, Hugues de Thé and myself. The 1st two will be on 12 and 26 May, all info below. See you there!

🟣 L’Administrateur, l’Assemblée des professeurs et toute la communauté du Collège de France apprennent avec une profonde tristesse le décès de Xavier Le Pichon, professeur émérite du Collège de France, titulaire de la chaire de #Géodynamique (1986-2008).

You’d be more than welcome. Make it a weekend in Paris!

⭐️ Please Fwd. Are you in Paris on 16th May? See👇 poster of symposium on « Information processing in biological systems » @collegedefrance.bsky.social Fantastic line of speakers 🤩.
It is free, w/o registration, and it will be exciting.m!
Follows from my series of lectures at CdF last fall.

John Reinitz, systems biologist, 1958-2025 Reinitz helped pioneer a data-driven, systems approach to developmental biology that is now widely used in the field today.

Shocking: a pioneer in quantitative developmental biology passed... one of my all-time heroes! He had a dominant influence on many in the early 2000s when this field started to take off. What a loss!

Obituary written by two of his former students:
biologicalsciences.uchicago.edu/news/john-re...