The peer-reviewed version of our cephalic furrow paper is out 🎉 It was published back-to-back with another cephalic furrow study: Research mutualism This was a wonderful collaborative effort to understand the developmental role and evolutionary origins of this prominent but overlooked tissue fold of fly embryos. We were two teams working on a similar question, […]
Tag: drosophila melanogaster
The mitotic waves made it onto the Sächsische Zeitung, a regional newspaper published in Dresden (thanks to Katrin Boes from MPI-CBG). They wrote a nice little piece about the video. I translated it to English (using DeepL…). You can read it below. Scientist receives coveted film award Dresden researcher turns little fruit flies into movie […]
My video of mitotic waves won Nikon’s 2024 Small World in Motion video competition! I’m thrilled 🎉 To learn more about the video, check out Nikon’s press release and their article for the series Masters of Microscopy. There’s also a blog post that I wrote a couple of years ago with some biological information and […]
preLights is a (another) great initiative from The Company of Biologists where teams of scientists review and comment on preprints of interest for the biology community. I was delighted to hear that they were going to highlight our cephalic furrow preprint (Vellutini et al.) combined with the cephalic furrow preprint of Lemke and Wang labs […]
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Cephalic furrow thread
I published a cephalic furrow thread about our paper on Twitter and Mastodon. We recently updated the manuscript on bioRxiv. In addition to the tissue mechanics, this new version includes gene expression data comparing Drosophila with Clogmia, a fly that has no cephalic furrow… It gives us some hints about the patterning changes associated with […]
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.
After a first try back in 2020, I’ve recently migrated my account to my new social handle (@bruvellu) and started using Mastodon again. I’m excited about it. Migrating away from Twitter (and other corporate social silos) will be good for the web in general and for science communities in particular. Here’s my introduction to the […]
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. This week, the conference Mechanobiology in Development and Disease is happening at the EMBL Heidelberg. 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 for gastrulation.
Cephalic furrow the early foldDivides the embryo in one go.Pulling in on its ownDeep it sinks into the yolk. This great divide of tissue foldSplits the embryo in back and front.But why the furrow once it growsStretches flat and gone it goes? A fold that folds and then unfoldsLeave us wondering what’s the role.