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Winter Wandering

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biology articles

InverteFest December 2022

The InverteFest is here. A moment to celebrate the overlooked diversity of invertebrates around us. I’m re-posting a video I made for the Cifonauta account on Instagram showing different marine invertebrates moving around under the microscope. Enjoy! Invertebrate Gallery Check the gallery below to find out the identity of each marine invertebrate in the movie […]

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EvoDevo Papers on Mastodon

Back in 2015, I created EvoDevo_Papers, an automated account that tweets the latest research papers in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (or evo-devo). I was inspired by the FlyPapers Experiment and the pioneers bots @fly_papers and @phy_papers. I wanted something similar for the evo-devo community to keep up with the literature and discover interesting […]

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The MeMoDEvo Symposium

Last week, I joined the MeMoDEvo Symposium in Paris. The name stands for Mechanics-Morphogenesis-Development-Evolution. And indeed, it was a great meeting about all of these things! The participants had quite diverse backgrounds. From biologists and physicists to computer scientists and engineers, as well as theorists and philosophers. During the mornings, we had “unconference” sessions where […]

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biology articles imaging

Mitotic waves and gastrulation in a fly embryo

Last year I published a snapshot of a mitotic wave in a fruit fly embryo. Here’s the video of that same embryo going through cleavage (nuclei divisions) and gastrulation (cell movements): Mitotic waves What you see at the beginning of the movie are the cycles of synchronous nuclei divisions. They happen in waves from the […]

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imaging articles code

ImageJ macro to synchronize and combine image stacks

When I film embryos under the microscope, some will be younger and some will be older than others—they are never in perfect synchrony. This is fine when watching the recordings of individual embryos, but becomes an issue when you want to watch two (or more) embryos developing side-by-side. In my case, I want to identify […]

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Convert video to animated GIF

Something that I began doing more often is converting videos of developing embryos or marine invertebrates to animated GIFs. But how to do this conversion without affecting the quality of the video? Some time ago I found this guide to convert videos to high-quality animated GIFs using the tool FFmpeg. The trick is to generate […]

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music articles

The Pluteus Trip

The Pluteus Trip is a music compilation that I created inspired by the life of these nifty echinoderm larvae named pluteus. It was released more than ten years ago in my (now defunct) music blog ccNeLaS. The album is freely available at: https://archive.org/details/ThePluteusTrip Please find the original description below and enjoy the trip! Plutei are […]

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biology articles

Is Lineus longissimus the longest animal on Earth?

Which is the longest animal on this planet? Last year the PeerJ journal published an article about the largest marine animals. The neat infographic accompanying their tweet immediately got my attention (if the figure is not showing up, check it in full resolution here): For a couple of milliseconds, I thought the scale bar below the […]

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biology articles

Segmentation, a question of boundaries

Read the previous section: Spiral cleavage, an oblique matter. Annelids, arthropods and vertebrates show a remarkable morphological diversity (Chipman, 2010). Beneath this multiplicity of shapes and forms lies a common pattern of body organization—a trunk divided into repeated parts. This pattern and the developmental process that generates it are known as segmentation (Minelli and Fusco, […]