Lori O'Brien

Going to have to carve some time out for this!

When your cat is obsessed with #PuppyBowl. As a special needs adoptee herself, she’s a huge advocate.

I am very excited to visit NC State this weekend and give a seminar on Monday! I'll be in Raleigh from Saturday to Tuesday so I'm joyfully accepting all running trail suggestions, dining ideas, cool places to sit and write 6 R01s, and any friends who want to say Hi!

gga.ncsu.edu/event/tim-mo...

Microscopy image of a kidney only showing the highly branched arterial tree in magenta against a black background.

The beauty of the kidney arterial tree for this #FluorescenceFriday. Evans Blue dye labels the vasculature. Image courtesy of postdoc Sarah McLarnon.

A high-resolution, easy-to-build light-sheet microscope for subcellular imaging An accessible light-sheet microscope delivers subcellular-resolution, multicolor volumetric, and live-cell imaging, lowering barriers to state-of-the-art performance.

In @elife.bsky.social: A high-resolution, easy-to-build light-sheet microscope for subcellular imaging doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Hope so too as I assume the problem will only get worse as deadlines approach. Still no progress with mine.

Announcement of the show and a view of last year's crowd

Great things still happen all around us. Each your UNC Biology's Bob Goldstein and Art's Beth Grabowski co-teach ARTS/BIOL 409, that brings together artists and scientists to explore an intersection of two disciplines. It culminated this year with a remarkable show Friday 1/n

That’s great news! 🤞

Ugh, I’m sorry. Not much better here. My request is still somewhere in the ether with an auto reply date of January 20th for resolving issues. 😭

Pro tip: NEVER log into My NCBI with more than one 3rd party option. It creates a whole new account that can’t be deleted. I apparently did this once with the ORCiD login (as opposed to normal eRA login) and now I can’t link my ORCiD ID to my SciENcv. I have to ask the Help Desk to merge accounts. 🫠

Introducing Cyclically Multiplexed Expansion Microscopy (Cy-ExM): a workflow for 3D nanoscale, high-plex imaging in whole cells. Cryo-preserved ultrastructure + iterative labeling + expansion microscopy → 20 targets in one dataset with ~70 nm lateral resolution.

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

Thanks so much, Rejji!

Image of a developing kidney collecting duct system in yellow with innervating nerve fibers in cyan.

Image of a sectioned ganglion with many colors highlighting the cell bodies and nuclei.

Image of a developing kidney showing nephron progenitors in yellow and collecting duct system in blue.

It’s certainly been a year, but I’m incredibly grateful that earlier in 2025 I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure! Huge thanks to you all for promoting our work here and on the other site, for talk invites, for writing letters of support, and to the lab for all their contributions. 🥂

Unfortunately the drop in ESI funding rates is not paired with changes in funding required to get tenure. It’s not just the next three years of our labs at risk, but the rest of our careers. We are also the cohort that started in the COVID pandemic- it’s been nothing but “unprecedented times”…

Most transcriptomics studies sample ~0.001% of a mouse. Which region do we choose? Often: we guess.
Meet DISCO-seq 🤗 flipping the order: RNA-preserving clearing → whole-organ/whole-body 3D imaging → pick ROIs in 3D → unbiased scRNA-seq.
Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

title, authors and abstract from link

In a paper out this month in @jcb.org we present evidence implicating intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) as key to junctional assembly and function 2/n 🧪
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41099653/

Our new work Cilia.io is out on the Rxiv. Ece Atayeter and Jason Ho trained an ML computer vision transformer for detection and quantification of cilia morphology and dynamics. We will provide a GUI soon. Another great collaboration w/ @jbwallingford.bsky.social

Enhancer-directed gene delivery for digit regeneration based on conserved epidermal factors Limb loss remains a significant clinical challenge, but regenerative medicine approaches such as gene therapy offer a promising strategy to trigger endogenous regeneration programs. Optimal vector con...

🚨 Preprint Friday! 🚨

Thrilled to highlight this collab with David Brown at Duke @cutitoutdave.bsky.social and Ken Poss at UW Madison/Morgridge @kenposs.bsky.social. By comparing 3(!!) regenerating models we identify a conserved role for Sp-family TFs in appendage regeneration (and more).....🧵

I think this is it. While this isn’t a change for some ICs in terms of percentile cut offs, how are these additional criteria, that were not always taken into account before, going to be balanced? What is their weight in decisions on funding?

UNC's Center for Molecular Medicine has up to three open-rank positions for faculty conducting research with relevance to gene therapy, including: novel iPSC and animal models of disease and basic cell biology. Join us in beautiful Chapel Hill! Deadline 1/31/26: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/309...

Durham, NC about 10 minutes ago

Flashback #FluorescenceFriday to some of the first light-sheet imaging we were doing. Video shows the collecting duct system of the developing kidney labeled with a pan-cytokeratin antibody. Courtesy of former talented technician Deanna Hardesty.

🆕 KidneyCure is committing up to $6 million over three years to help eligible NIH R01 applicants ranked in the top 15% continue their kidney research with a $100K award.

Learn more and explore every KidneyCure opportunity: https://bit.ly/kcgrantsfunding

Yeah, this year is chaos for study sections. Mine was scheduled for last week. We got a email from CSR communications the night before telling us it was postponed and not to join the scheduled meeting.

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...

Figure from our review paper showing various fluorescence microscopy images of cells and structures of the kidney

Sharing this excellent review now out from postdoc Sarah McLarnon! Lots of useful info on 3D imaging, quantification of imaging data, and how this has been applied to the kidney. And since it's #FluorescenceFriday, sharing a figure with our own imaging data!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

RhoA (blue) and the actin cytoskeleton (magenta) are shown in a set of primary microglia.

For #FluorescenceFriday, RhoA (blue) and the actin cytoskeleton (magenta) are shown in a set of primary microglia 🔬 #Neuroscience #Microscopy

My entry for today’s #FluorescenceFriday: a pupal #Drosophila testis with muscles expressing
🔵 lifeact &
🔴 RFP-nls

Honored & grateful to receive an honorable mention at @healthcare.nikon.com Nikon Small World 🌍🔬✨

🔗 www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20...

#NikonSmallWorld #Microscopy #ScienceArt

Zoomed up image of the collecting ducts of an adult mouse kidney. The collecting ducts are labeled with an AQP2 antibody and are green. They look like long green squiggles.

And a zoomed view of the intricate collecting system.

Image of a fluorescently labeled adult mouse kidney showing AQP2 staining of collecting ducts and connecting segment in green and alpha SMA staining of the arterial tree in magenta. The collecting ducts look like squiggly branches.

For this #FluorescenceFriday, a gorgeous image of an adult mouse kidney labeled with AQP2 and alpha SMA antibodies. AQP2 (green) marks the collecting duct and distal connecting segment while SMA marks the arterial tree. Courtesy of talented postdoc Sarah McLarnon.