My last Friday night in Dresden before the big move.
Tag: postdoc
Posts related to my position as a postdoctoral researcher in the Tomancak Lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany.
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, […]
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 […]
Last June, I went to the conference of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology, or EuroEvoDevo. It’s a meeting that I’ve been going to every edition for the past decade. This year it was hosted in Helsinki, Finland. The venue and organization were impeccable, and I thoroughly enjoyed the program overall. My feeling is […]
spotLights is a podcast-like, interview series to highlight the people and stories behind the latest preprints. It is part of the preLights initiative organized by The Company of Biologists. The first spotLights episode is out, and it features… me 🥸 The conversation was about the cephalic furrow preprint, which was also reviewed by preLighters earlier […]
Categories
Confocal excitation
The pipetting marathon I went through the other day was worth it—the experiment worked! Now I get to image some exciting and colorful samples in the confocal microscope, and experience that thrill of seeing something for the first time, once again 🌈🔬
Science is exciting, right? You explore, you experiment, you make discoveries. You see things for the first time! Science is fun. But, it also has its boring parts. Today, for example, I spent four hours pipetting, non-stop. 280 tubes. No robots, no multichannel pipette. Just manual labor. The pipetting marathon is for an experiment, which […]
Categories
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.
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 […]