Our work on #hornwort #pyrenoids is finally out in @science.org! 🎉 We uncovered how hornworts pack their Rubisco into pyrenoids and successfully recreated them in Arabidopsis. A key step toward engineering more efficient photosynthesis in crops @btiscience.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Thrilled to share that our preprint has been accepted in Science Advances! Grateful to an incredible team & collaborators.
Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
👏 @annaferraioli.bsky.social @maikekittelmann.bsky.social
@msarscentre.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu @hfspo.bsky.social #ctenophores
A 2000 year old barrel sponges in the Banda Sea spawn with the full moon, a rare natural spectacle of life. Found throughout the
tropical coral reef environments in the Atlantic Ocean, these sponges grow slowly but can live for centuries or thousands of years in
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)
Two funded PhD positions investigating the evolution of sarcomeres @ibdm.bsky.social in @biancah0406.bsky.social and our lab, together with @cnidevo.bsky.social - Interested to explore how similar or different Jellyfish sarcomeres are to Drosophila or human ones?
www.ibdm.univ-amu.fr/ibdm_job/2-a...
Evolution of monoamine reception and its role in cellular contractility.
How do #sponges coordinate their bodies despite lacking neurons and true muscles?
We show that sponges use monoamines to control water flow in their canals — reminiscent of how adrenaline regulates blood vessels.
My PhD story, now on BioRxiv:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#Evolution
In @eLife: Neural connectome of the ctenophore statocyst https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.108420
Version of record of our ctenophore nerve-net connectome paper.
Registration is OPEN for the 2026 Santa Cruz Meeting on Developmental Biology!!! Please spread the word!
@mads100tist.bsky.social @socdevbio.bsky.social @bsdb.bsky.social @xenbase.bsky.social @isdb.bsky.social @devbiol.bsky.social @the-node.bsky.social
scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu
Congratulations to @arnausebe.bsky.social, Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2025 in the category of Life Sciences and Medicine. The award ceremony will take place today at the historic Saló de Cent and was presided over by the Mayor of Barcelona. Full story: www.crg.eu/en/news/arna...
Excited to announce a new preprint from my PhD student @pawley.bsky.social :
"The discovery of an external bacterial niche reconciles sequencing-based microbiomes in a freshwater sponge."
He’s also hilarious. I wish he was mic’d up every game
The last word on Ctenophores versus Sponges (not).
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
❤️🔥
Seeing this video of two Great Horned owls (Bubo virginianus) from Colton Lockridge you might think:
"Get a room, you two."
But, uh... these are juvenile siblings. 🤨
The behavior shown here is called 'billing' or 'bill fencing' & it's a playful social interaction, *no matter what it looks like*.
1/3 Jellyfish and anemones also sleep, despite not having a brain
Not only do they sleep, but their behavior is affected if they lack sleep; they become clumsier and need to catch up on lost sleep. Interestingly, they sleep 8 hours a day, just like us.
(paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A giant virus forms a specialized subcellular environment within its amoeba host for efficient translation www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I saw one of these last week for the first time, in San Diego. What a coincidence to see, it mentioned in my bluesky timeline! It had a barnacle on one end, and red algae growing off of that like a ribbon streamer
Our eLetter github.com/caseywdunn/s... responding to a recent Science paper was just posted. The paper found more genes with consistent support for sponge-sister than ctenophore-sister. We found several technical issues that, when corrected, reverse the conclusions and recover ctenophore-sister.
Our latest: Independent origins of spicules reconcile paleontological and molecular evidence of sponge evolutionary history, led by @meleonora-rossi.bsky.social with help from friends @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social including @anariesgo.bsky.social @evopalaeo.bsky.social Davide Pisani and many others
Tectura paleacea … surfgrass limpet. Only grows as wide as the seagrass blade it lives on.
Help with invert ID? Point lobos, Carmel CA. I don’t know what either the yellow or the while things are. White looks like it has two siphons, yellow has only one. Thinking the yellow might be a keyhole limpet? No idea about the white one….
It's official - my new book is officially published today! If you mentor science students who write - grad or undergrad - you're the reason we wrote this. Mentoring/teaching writing is hard; but we can make it easier!
Finally, we’ve solved a long-standing mystery: what tintinnid shells are actually made of:
A new class of biomaterial formed by remarkable structural proteins unique to tintinnids.
A major milestone after 3 years of work! Read about it in our preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...
#ProtistsOnSky
My review of Max Telford’s excellent new book ‘The Tree of Life’ by @maxjtelford.bsky.social published today in the Wall Street Journal @wsj.com @wwnorton.com
www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
Tour de force #UExM study of #protist #cytoskeleton structures (>200 species🤯), led by @dudinlab.bsky.social, @gautamdey.bsky.social. A must for #tubulin & #centrin aficionados🤩
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
P. tenue, its symbionts, and natural habitat
End-of-year preprint dump! A collaboration with @messorensen.bsky.social and German and Korean colleagues: "The phylogenetic context for the origin of a unique purple-green photosymbiosis "
doi.org/10.64898/202...
🚨 POSTDOC OPENING 🚨
NIH-funded Bio-Fluid Mechanics Postdoc in my lab @univmiami.bsky.social
Hofstenia miamia | cilia-driven flows | behavior & neuroscience
Collab w/ Mansi Srivastava @harvard.edu
🕒 Start: Jan–Feb 2026
⏳ 1 yr, renewable | Email me ASAP!
#Postdoc #Biophysics #FluidDynamics
Excited to share the final version of our study on Nematostella cell type regulatory programs. Part of our @erc.europa.eu StG project, this was a challenging 5-year effort extraodinarily led by @aelek.bsky.social and @martaig.bsky.social.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
