#devbiol — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #devbiol, aggregated by home.social.
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"Higher-Order Cell Tracking Transformer", Bragantini et al. 2026 (Loïc Royer's lab).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11754Computer vision done right. This time, to track cells as they divide and move about, in a Petri dish or in a developing animal.
The code: https://github.com/royerlab/hoct
Most improvement is in performance (fewer computer resources needed to do the same job) and in needing less human input.
"Evaluated on the Cell Tracking Challenge and a bacteria division benchmark, HOCT achieves state-of-the-art results without deep pre-trained image encoders."
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"These observations argue that both local intrajunctional and long-distance interjunctional synaptic competition are activity-mediated and that the structure of mature neural circuits arises from the activity patterns of developing circuits."
From: "Connectomic evidence that ordered activity drives neuromuscular network formation", Yaron Meirovitch et al. 2026 (Lichtman lab).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02344-7 -
I didn't think anything an acoel is or can do would surprise me at this point (I do have a PhD in the embryonic development of a somewhat related animal group, the flatworms), but here we are:
"they investigated reproductive behaviour and discovered a new mode of egg-laying: H. miamia lays eggs through its mouth. The eggs are deposited in communal clutches, and individuals assess environmental conditions to decide whether – and when – to lay eggs, indicating a more complex neural control of reproductive activity."
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Very amusing to see how the vertebrate developmental neurobiology field is converging with #Drosophila and insects in general with regard to the mechanisms of brain development:
"Together, these findings suggest a lineage-based mechanism for scalable positional information that complements diffusion-based mechanisms and offers a general framework for tissue patterning."
That sentence has been used for decades to describe fruit fly brain development.
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"A lineage-based model of scalable positional information in vertebrate brain development", Kerstjens et al. 2026
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627325010001"Analyzing brain-wide developmental expression in mouse and larval zebrafish, we find that principal eigengenes—co-expression patterns across thousands of genes—span multiple spatial scales, remain stable over development, and are conserved across species."
I'm going to have to read this one very slowly.
Amusing to see one junior and three very senior authors: F. Engert, R.J. Douglas and A.M. Zador.
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A good read on a bad day
"We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. It's worth knowing about the experiments that empowered us and learning the stories behind the experiments"
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Excellent short video by Tamina Lebek explaining her new neighbour-labelling technology and her dreams of a PUFFFIN zoo!
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#introduction. I am a plant developmental geneticist. The lab addresses a fundamental biological question: how does morphogenesis translate genotype into form? To this end we study signaling at the plasma membrane - cell wall interface and we investigate how mechanical forces influence tissue shape using 3D digital ovules.
Main interests:
#Arabidopsis #CellBiology #cellbio #CellWall #devbio #devbiol #DevelopmentalBiology #EvoDevo #imaging #lignin #MechanoBiology #microscopy #PlantBiology -
Very important for the field of #connectomics is the measurement of stereotypy in neuronal number and morphology within identified cell types–most neurons in the #Drosophila brain are uniquely identifiable and stereotyped.
The stereotypy is very strong across brains – these are excellent news for experimental robustness, i.e., mapping circuits in one brain and performing behavioral and functional experiments in many others.
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"A consensus cell type atlas from multiple connectomes reveals principles of circuit stereotypy and variation", by Schlegel et al. 2023 (Greg Jefferis lab at #MRCLMB in collaboration with the Bock, Murthy, and Seung labs, and also Volker Hartenstein)
Interesting to me in particular, and here I see the hand of Volker Hartenstein (my postdoc adviser!), is the annotation of developmental units: the neuronal lineages (Fig 2 below).
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"Phylogenetic tracing of midbrain-specific regulatory sequences suggests single origin of eubilaterian brains", by Schuster and Hirth, 2023 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade8259
A genetic signature of bilateral animals with brains, including "a genetic boundary separating the rostral from caudal nervous systems, demonstrated for the metameric brains of annelids, arthropods, and chordates and the asegmental cycloneuralian and urochordate brain"
In other words, the genetic toolkit of the ancestor of both protostomes (arthropods, nematodes, molluscs and annelids) and deuterostomes (echinoderms and vertebrates) – the eubilaterian.
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New work on the #chinmo gene that controls fly larval development, by Sílvia Chafino et al. 2023 https://elifesciences.org/articles/84648
… building on prior work by Truman & Riddiford 2022 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2201071119 on “Chinmo is the larval member of the molecular trinity that directs Drosophila metamorphosis”
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“Origin of wiring specificity in an olfactory map revealed by neuron type–specific, time-lapse imaging of dendrite targeting”, by Wong et al. 2023 (Liqun Luo’s lab). https://elifesciences.org/articles/85521
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@lana By the same senior author, Rodney J. Douglas, there are works on self-construction of the cerebral cortex from a single cell:
“Simulating cortical development as a self constructing process: a novel multi-scale approach combining molecular and physical aspects”, Fred Zubler et al. 2013
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003173“Developmental self-construction and-configuration of functional neocortical neuronal networks”, Roman Bauer et al. 2014
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003994 -
@lana In silico organism development from a single cell, like in biology, has been done. See for example “The self-construction and-repair of a foraging organism by explicitly specified development from a single cell” by Fabian Roth et al. 2007 https://direct.mit.edu/artl/article-abstract/13/4/347/2575 where they design a self-constructing and self-repairing—by keeping the developmental program running—artificial organism that behaves like a #Braitenberg vehicle.
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#connectomics meets #transcriptomics to explain synaptic specificity in #Drosophila:
Yoo et al. 2023
http://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.03.534791v1 -
:happy: Just found this on the bird net :happy:
📣 📣 📣 Delighted to distribute the announcement of the 6th European Cilia conference CILIA2024
I can't wait to meet everyone and present our work in Dublin!
To those not familiar with cilia and flagella: these are the greatest organelles of all 😊
#Cilia2024 #Cilia2022 #RareDisease #ADPKD #BBS
#DevBiol #CellBiology #Science
@cilia -
You are welcome–it's been fun to discover an entirely different slice of science and research here, starting this past October. My presence in the other side is nominal, keeping an account there as a flag and pointer to here. The move gave me the chance to follow more entomology accounts and learn more about insects and small invertebrates I'd like to map some day. Also: one has to follow more accounts here to sample the #neuroscience and #DevBiol fields as broadly as we did on the other side, as the only promotion algorithm is the boost button.
In other news, this week we installed a Bruker SkyScan microCT in the lab, courtesy of the #MRCLMB (I love this place), and we are over the moon. It's essential to quality-control samples that proceed to electron microscopy for #connectomics. But it's also going to prove useful to scan whole small animals densely at 0.5 to 1 µm isotropic resolution.
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Este 2023 de llevará a cabo el 2°congreso colombiano de Biología del Desarrollo, en Medellín. El registro está abierto.
The second Colombian Congress of Developmental Biology is approaching. To register, just scan the QR code
#biology #developmentalbiology #developmental #colombia #medellin #devbiol #DevBio