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 […]
Tag: embryo
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.
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 […]
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 […]
I’m pleased to announce that my short video A Sea Biscuit’s Life is now available on Labocine at https://www.labocine.com/films/a-sea-biscuits-life. The sea biscuits are joining the Science New Wave!
Every time I open Spotify, I see the pattern of engrailed expression in an early Platynereis larva. Once you see it, there is no turning back! Reference Prud’homme, B., de Rosa, R., Arendt, D., Julien, J.-F., Pajaziti, R., Dorresteijn, A. W. C., Adoutte, A., Wittbrodt, J., & Balavoine, G. (2003). Arthropod-like expression patterns of engrailed […]
A mitotic wave traveling through an early #Drosophila #embryo #FlyFriday
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 […]
This is a bryozoan embryo with its blastopore facing us. The blastopore is the hole in the middle. The “balls” are the nuclei of the cells that make up the embryo. While cells have many other structures, they are not visible in this image. The only thing visible is the DNA because I stained it […]
A short video that I made about the embryonic development of the likeable Drosophila, also known as fruit fly or vinegar fly, won an honorable mention in the Small World in Motion. The details on the techniques I used and the video on its full resolution are available for download and re-use on the Wikimedia […]