@vishankjs
Postdoctoral associate in the Principles of Tissue Morphogenesis Lab led by PI Akankshi Munjal, in the Department of Cell Biology in the Duke University School of Medicine. https://www.munjallab.com Interested in the physics of living systems!
New Perspective form Rory Maizels & me: "Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations"
Gene regulatory networks are supposed to give us mechanistic explanations of development, so why are we drowning in 'hairballs' of statistical correlations?
rdcu.be/e7zx7
Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).
A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)
Wild-caught zebrafish in Nepal 🦓🐟
We summarised the many roles of material phase transitions in development (and they are not just mechanical 🤔)
New preprint!
arxiv.org/abs/2602.08105
We use mutual information to find the shared dimensionality of shared latent space between two high-dimensional variables. Turning inference into optimization, we use it to figure out dofs in movies and critical scaling in Ising!
Advanced grad students + postdocs: apply for the 2026 #kitpqbio summer course, "Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals," at buff.ly/OXXMKEv. Apply by Feb. 1.
Course directors Adrienne Roeder (Cornell) and Sebastian Streichan (UCSB)
Instructors include @akankshi.bsky.social, @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social, @dianapinheiro.bsky.social, @chloeroffay.bsky.social, & @streichan.bsky.social among others! 🐟
Seconded. If anything, it has never been a better time to be a biophysicist, a complex system physicists, etc…. And it is a bit sad that much of it now happens *outside* of physics departments (for good and bad reasons…)
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
Next Monday 26th Jan, we are very excited to hear two talks from Margot Smit @likeyoda1.bsky.social and Susan Wopat @suewop.bsky.social!
Visit our website(ucammorphogenesisseries.com) for more details, and be sure to subscribe to our mailing list(lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/u...). See you soon!!
Looking forward to sharing my postdoctoral work in just a little over a week at the UCAM Morphogenesis Series! 🐟🔬🔦
The Cambridge Morphogenesis Seminar Series is back! 🎉
Check out the flyer for a great lineup of speakers for Lent Term 2026!
Don't forget to subscribe to our mailing list to get all the information, including the Zoom link. We are excited to see you again soon 👋
Feb 1 deadline approaching for our @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social QBio summer course on Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals. @streichan.bsky.social
@maurazimmermann.bsky.social @maizel-lab.org @yusuke-mori.bsky.social @akankshi.bsky.social @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social
How does a uniform zygote reliably break symmetry?
How do initially identical cells diverge in cell-cycle timing and transcriptional state?
In our new paper in Nature Physics, we show that embryo geometry itself is sufficient to pattern early development.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A screenshot of the 'The hard truth about how hard it is to publish in Development' article PDF.
The hard truth about how hard it is to publish in Development
Editor-in-Chief @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social leads our team of Academic Editors in addressing the perception that Development is ‘too hard to publish in’ by discussing the journal's review process.
doi.org/10.1242/dev....
Open-source atlas of fruit fly development DynamicAtlas is a high-res framework for morphological studies
📹 M. F. Lefebvre, V. Jain-Sharma, N. Claussen & N. P. Mitchell et al @streichan.bsky.social lab University of California Santa Barbara in @natmethods.nature.com
➡️ bpod.org.uk/archive/2026...
Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
Society for Developmental Biology Ethel Browne Harvey Postdoctoral Seminar Series Friday, January 9, 2026, 3:00pm - 4:00 pm Eastern Time Priyom Adhyapok (Duke University) A biological oscillator controls the pace of notochord segmentation Zong-Yuan Liu (University of Michigan) Endogenous FGFs drive ERK-dependent cell fate patterning in 2D human gastruloids
The next the Ethel Browne Harvey Postdoc Seminar will be this Friday, January 9 at 3 pm Eastern Time with Priyom Adhyapok @priyomadhyapok.bsky.social @duke-university.bsky.social and Zong-Yuan Liu @UMich. Register today and join us. bit.ly/4ncxr0M #SDBPostdocSeminar
Also read the News & Views highlighting this work, here:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
DynamicAtlas: a morphodynamic atlas of Drosophila development.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Priyom Adhyapok
Oscillator phases (circles) with averages (squares) on the unit circle as a function of time
.@priyomadhyapok.bsky.social of @duke-university.bsky.social will kick off the #SDBPostdocSeminar with her talk "A biological oscillator controls the pace of notochord segmentation" Image: Oscillator phases (circles) with averages (squares) on the unit circle as a function of time
How can cells use information from neighboring cells to improve the spatial precision of morphogen patterns? 🤔
We show that cells can gain positional information by "talking" to their neighbors - how much depends critically on spatial correlations of the patterns.
buff.ly/w56OUJT
Self-organized or instructed?
My @natrevgenet.nature.com Journal Club traces how classic papers revealed two modes of developmental patterning & why the debate between Turing and Wolpert is as timely as ever for organoid engineering today
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Interested in the biophysics of organoids? We just published a review in Dev Cell—take a look! dlvr.it/TPyTb8 #Organoids #Biophysics
Congrats Nikhil! This is truly amazing work and it’s great to see it out!
Thread highlights new work from @nikhil-mishra.bsky.social & @heisenbergcplab.bsky.social 🐟
Link to open-access article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Very happy to finally see this out! :)
🔬 New paper in Developmental Biology 🐟
Our researchers have now tested a largely ignored hypothesis—that the geometry of an embryo drives its development. Read more in the 🧵below.
📷 Zebrafish in ISTA’s Aquatic Facility.
We anticipate that this resource will be useful for the broad Drosophila community (and as a rich trove of data for theorists everywhere!)
More generally, we hope that the DynamicAtlas framework will provide a template for quantitative, dynamic analysis of morphogenesis in other living systems!
DynamicAtlas resources are all publicly available! Links below:
Datasets are on Dryad (please explore!!!)…
doi.org/10.25349/D9W...
Python code is on Zenodo…
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
MATLAB code is on GitHub…
github.com/npmitchell/d...
…and code tutorials are in the Supplementary Information.
