Benjamin Kroeger

Glob-glob! Absolutely magical sea anemone larva (about 7 mm) from The Lombok Strait, Indonesia 🇮🇩

Spatial patterning of contractility by a self-organized mechanogen activity gradient underlies Drosophila gastrulation - Nature Communications During morphogenesis patterned contractility drives tissue shape changes. Here they show that GPCR signaling and integrin activation give rise to a dynamically translocating gradient of contractility ...

New paper out! In this project, we focused on the question how tissue mechanics is spatially controlled during development. We show that the GPCR ligand Fog acts as a “mechanogen” during Drosophila gastrulation, driving a self-organized wave of tissue invagination:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

Not something you see in textbooks very often: tripolar mitosis.

Hello epithelial mechanics fans!! I’m Juanma @juanmagararc.bsky.social 👋 I work on cell mechanics (see celldynamicslab.com) and use Flipper-TR FLIM to probe membrane biophysics in cells.

Join me on this tour about Flipper: what it measures, strengths, advice, cool case studies, and cute drawings!

Really excited to share our new paper in @nature.com! We uncovered how a physical instability of the cytoplasm coupled with the cell cycle drives cytoplasmic partitioning in early embryos #zebrafish #drosophila. Read more in this🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩
@poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de

How can structures at the vertex of 3 cells have effects at the tissue level?

Join me, @laura-rustarazo.bsky.social, to explore how tricellular junctions (TCJs) act as local tension sensors and regulators of global tissue organization. 🧵⤵️ doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Direct labeling of microtubule turnover reveals in-lattice repair and stabilization patterns in developing neurons The microtubule cytoskeleton is the backbone of neuronal morphogenesis, driving the development of the dendrites and axon, and supporting trafficking to distant compartments. How neuronal microtubules...

🚨The Neurocyto lab is branching out in our latest preprint! We used tubulin microinjection to directly visualize microtubule turnover in developing hippocampal neurons, demonstrating the presence of in-lattice repair and a selective stabilization in the nascent axon. Check below, or read on 🧵 1/9

Bored over the holidays? Give our new preprint on how #microtubule lattice alteration by taxols can regulate #RhoA #signalling via GEF-H1 a read!

Perhaps a new mechanism of action for taxol #chemotherapeutics during interphase.

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

Happy holidays ✨🎄

SET1/MLL complexes control transcription independently of H3K4me3 Histone H3 lysine 4 trimethylation (H3K4me3) at gene promoters is thought to play a central role in gene transcription. H3K4 methylation is deposited by the SET1 (A/B) and MLL (1-4) multi-protein comp...

An early Christmas present for those interested in chromatin and transcription! Fantastic work from @au-ho-yu.bsky.social and @aleksszczurek.bsky.social . Thanks to Inge and Michiel for their help. Please repost!

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

Exciting new #Zebrafish research from the #WeinsteinLab, led by Jong Park!
“Specialized gas-exchange endothelium of the zebrafish gill” —

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

Amazing to see red blood cells moving through the gills! Don’t forget to check out the supplemental movies ;-)

📣 I hereby make my Bluesky debut to announce that our work linking DNA binding affinities and kinetics 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘳𝘰 and 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘰 for the human transcription factor KLF1 just got published in Cell! @cp-cell.bsky.social

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Key findings in a thread (1/6):

Very interesting work from my dear friend, Fil! Congratulations to everyone involved in this excellent paper!

Motivational video for #MigrationMovieMonday. A persistent 4T1 breast cancer cell squeezing itself through a tight constriction despite undergoing repetitive nuclear envelope rupture. Credit: Kristen Nedza @weillinstitute.bsky.social

(A) An adult female in the field on Sicyos angulatus. (B) Back view of an adult female reared on cucumber, whose hindleg organs are covered with fungal hyphae (arrowheads). (C) Magnified image of the hindleg organ. (D to L) Morphology of hind tibia of adult male [(D) to (F)], immature adult female [(G) to (I)], and mature adult female [(J) to (L)]. [(D), (G), and (I)] Brightfield images. [(E), (H), and (K)] Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images. [(F), (I), and (L)] Magnified SEM images. (M to O) Peculiar behavior of egg-laying adult female. After laying each egg (M), the female rhythmically scratches the hyphae-covered hindleg organ with tarsal claws of the opposite hindleg (N) and then rubs the egg surface with the claws in a skillful manner (O). Also see movie S1. (P to R) Egg mass covered with fungal hyphae at 0-day (P), 3-day (Q), and 10-day (R) intervals after oviposition. Reddish color of 10-day eggs reflects the body color of developing nymphs inside.

What looked like a hearing organ on a tiny stinkbug’s leg turned out to be something far stranger: a fungal nursery that mother bugs use to coat their newly laid eggs in protective symbiotic hyphae, shielding their offspring from parasitic wasps.

Learn more in Science: https://scim.ag/4nDrDNm

High-plex spatial RNA imaging in one round with conventional microscopes using color-intensity barcodes - Nature Biotechnology The 64-plex fluorescence imaging of RNA in tissues is achieved in one imaging cycle

@lucianomartelotto, not on Bluesky, on a new Spatial RNA imaging method, PRISM. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Now added to #SingleCell #Spatial #Method bit.ly/scmethodstable

A new, nerdy paper. We figured out (some) of the rules underlying cell-permeability of probes and designed ligands that light up, grab, and move proteins around. Awesome @hhmijanelia.bsky.social x @uwmadison.bsky.social x @stjuderesearch.bsky.social collaboration! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Perspective from Richard McIntosh describing the history of research on #microtubule polymerization in terms of the ideas, technologies, and observations that have emerged as countless researchers have studied the dynamics of these essential cytoskeletal polymers. rupress.org/jcb/article/...

Beautiful work! Congratulations to all involved

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 🧵

We present multi-immersion Oblique Plane microscope (miOPM), a light-sheet platform that can be adapted to a wide range of applications, from sensitive live cell imaging to imaging organs and cleared tissues.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

See this? This = implanting mouse embryo. Usually this happens inside its mother and is invisible to us, but we can actually watch implantation ex vivo with the hope of understanding why implantation goes awry in embryos of older women. A 🧵...

Now out on bioRxiv. 🥳My research on #cytokinesis, averaging thousands of #ExM images🔬, creating a dynamic atlas of cytokinesis 🦠⏳. Here's an animated sneak peek of what we found. Better resolution on bioRxiv😄 #PSFoftheGIF

Up to 9-channel (3x3 colors) imaging using engineering fluorescent proteins (mTurquoise, mNeonGreen, mScarlet) with distinct lifetimes 🌈😎 🧪
www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Kinetic organization of the genome revealed by ultraresolution multiscale live imaging Genome function requires regulated genome motion. However, tools to directly observe this motion in vivo have been limited in coverage and resolution. Here we introduce an approach to tile mammalian c...

Congrats to my friends in the Boettiger lab for this really beautiful live imaging work. A big leap forward in understanding the dynamic side of genome organization. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

E-cadherin mechanotransduction activates EGFR-ERK signaling in epithelial monolayers by inducing ADAM-mediated ligand shedding Epithelial stretching promotes the release of EGF receptor ligands that stimulate ERK activation.

A bit delayed, but excited to still share our latest paper, showing that intercellular forces transduced by E-cadherin activate EGFR-ERK signaling in epithelia by inducing EGFR ligand shedding! Mechanical and biochemical signals can act together within a single, linear cascade! tinyurl.com/mr9mj9j2

We are all super happy and proud to see our work on the function and evolution of the #cephalic #furrow published in @nature.com. Let me say a few things about the background and history of this work on the #Evolution_of_Morphogenesis (1/12)

One more movie!
Using the RL algorithm (from pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...),
@masaashimazoe.bsky.social analyzed our nucleosome tracking data and classified them by their mobility.
Hotter color = faster motion (Slow🔵→ 🟢 → 🟡 → 🟠 Fast)

Fine structural organization of the interphase nucleus in some mammalian cells, Monneron & Bernard, 1969

Gotta love these classic papers about nuclear architecture. In hindsight, all that we understand and discover today was already contained in their images.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Giraffes are four distinct species, major report confirms The revised classification will help ensure different giraffe populations are adequately protected, conservationists say

Giraffes, long considered a single species, are in fact four. https://scim.ag/4n2po6f