Alfredo Sciortino

And here's my small contribution, an actin dynamic state that continuosuly contracts, on the roof of the museum!

"Hi everybody, please find my soon-to-come new work on the roof of Orsay" :-)

A snapshot from an exhibition at the Orsay Museum in Paris, with cells and filaments projected on its roof.

A snapshot from an exhibition at the Orsay Museum in Paris, with cells and filaments projected on its roof.

A snapshot from an exhibition at the Orsay Museum in Paris, with cells and filaments projected on its roof.

A snapshot from an exhibition at the Orsay Museum in Paris, with cells and filaments projected on its roof.

Some more snapshots :-)

This weekend we projected cells and filaments on the roof of the @museeorsay.bsky.social in Paris, then we contracted it with a pinch of myosin.
And it was fabulous!

Grateful to have been part of this art/science project & thx to @manuelthery.bsky.social @lblanchoin.bsky.social & the CytoMorphoLab

Go right or left? A question that we encounter very often in our daily lives, and while our decision may sometimes be hindered by the fear of making a mistake, cells DO NOT HESITATE!!! They swirl with the confidence of someone who’s always RIGHT… or LEFT!!!

Contractile forces direct the chiral swirling of minimal cell collectives | PNAS Chirality is a conserved biological feature with critical implications in tissue morphogenesis and embryonic development. In culture, multicellular...

@ghinabadih.bsky.social 's paper on cell chirality is now out : www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🥳

Congrats

Somebody doing a scientific présentation

Dress like your data like @timonnk.bsky.social does!

Synthetic cells get into shape - Nature Physics Shape changes in biological cells are driven by an active network of biopolymers. Now, similar deformations are observed in synthetic cell membranes.

Thanks to @agudocanalejo.bsky.social and @raovutukuri.bsky.social [amongst the first ones to observe large fluctuations in GUVs!] for today's News and Views about our recent paper on active vesicle deformations - and I agree with the conclusion, it's just a beginning..! doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Grande Gianni!

The Schaeffer magnum opus is out. 🔥

As always with @lauraal.bsky.social , the pleasrue is all mine ☺️ - thanks @crpp-bordeaux.bsky.social for the nice hospitality

Registration has started for the conference "Emerging Trends in the Physics of the Cell" in memoriam of Erich Sackmann at TU Munich from October 15-18 2025 www.cpa.tum.de/cpa/conferen...

Interesting read. Some problems are just weirder than you'd say.

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So, the DOGE kids intend to rewrite the social-security administration's COBOL code-base!

and they want to do it ...

... in *a few months*

I did a huge dive into COBOL a few years ago (www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazi...) ...

... so let me explain why DOGE is *way* over its skis here

1/9

And Petia* 😅

I am very happy to share that my work on active deformations of lipid vesicles is finally out in Nature Physics. A nicer thread+movies coming soon, in the meantime:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thx to Andreas, Hammad, Dmitry, Gerhard @laynefrechette.bsky.social and everybody else who contributed!

We are organizing a conference for young researchers at the intersection between physics & biology: www.embl.org/about/info/c... @embl.org @events.embl.org @intcha.bsky.social
Please consider applying/registering -- the deadline is already in one week!

A tweet by Elon Musk.

81% of Elon Musk thinks Elon Musk is a genius.

Graaaziee

Thanks!!

You know the pain 🥰 gracias

💘

So.. thanks for reading! I hope you liked it - and check out the preprint. Also thanks to @manuelthery.bsky.social and @lblanchoin.bsky.social , to Magali in particular, and to all coauthors (I think only @alexandra-colin.bsky.social is here..)! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Scheme of the transport process inside microwells.

So yes: filaments transport in 3D allows to separate a contractile flux at the bottom of the well with an extensile flux pushing filaments back to the periphery through the network's 3D architecture.

If the DSS is through filament transport in 3D then severing those bundles in the middle of the well should stop it. So we performed laser ablation and *zap* the bundles are gone and the DSS contracts and dies out.

Well apparently yes! The network uses its 3D architecture to "suck" filaments at the center and "inject" them back at the periphery - again, we show this with tracking filaments in 3D. But it's barely visible in the data, so we developed a killer experiment ;-) go to the next block to see it..

Well, if it is not nucleation and it is not transport in 2D, we might as well take a look at the network architecture in 3D! Using confocal we observe this weird tent-like structure - is it possible that filaments are transported through it?

Graph of actin filaments' speed.

What we find is that transport on the wells surface is coherent with actomyosin sliding combined with some "gliding" due to motors sticking to the membrane. But the net flux is still contractile, so what is pushing filaments back to the periphery...???

It's not actin turnover, the classical answer: this DSS works in the absence of actin nucleators or in the presence of phalloidin, i.e. with stabilized filaments. No depolymerization is present. So it has to be transport of the filaments. We combine a bunch of techniques to observe it, like speckle.