I wanted to denoise a twenty-year-old photomicrograph. It’s one of the first scientific images I created back in 2003. It’s so ancient that I used a camera with photographic film, developed and amplified it to 15×10cm print, and finally, scanned it to make a digital version. I used it in my undergraduate research project and […]
Category: biology
Our paper about the function of the cephalic furrow in the fruit fly is ready and now available as a preprint in bioRxiv! To access: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.30.534554 P. S. Apart from the poem The Great Divide, I didn’t write much about the cephalic furrow here. But this will change.
Currently listening to 2 Hours Of Squid 🦑 from the Krill Waves Radio by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Biology is exciting and informative, giving us insight into the beauty of life. What we see with the microscope is the amazing developmental process by which form emerges out of unformed material. To watch an embryo develop is to see the life of a new individual emerge, gradually, stage by stage, from very simple material […]
Great episode about mud dragons with María Herranz in the New Species podcast: — Post featured image by Alvaro E. Migotto, Fabiane Gallucci, Gustavo Fonseca, Maikon Di Domenico. Kinorhynch. Cifonauta image database. Available at: http://cifonauta.cebimar.usp.br/media/10461/
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 […]
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 […]
Mechanobiology investigates the role of physical forces in embryonic development. I’ll present my work on how the fold that divides the head from the trunk in Drosophila embryos—the cephalic furrow—may have an important mechanical role in gastrulation. The conference Mechanobiology in development and disease is happening in the EMBL Heidelberg.
The latest True Facts about Sea Stars is unmissable. The video is filled with delightful echinoderm biology and even covers some recent discoveries on these enigmatic creatures. Watch it!
Here’s a personal view about body symmetry and body openings from someone who lived through the evolution of bilateral symmetry. Form? I didn’t have any; that is, I didn’t know I had one, or rather I didn’t know you could have one. I grew more or less on all sides, at random; if this is […]