Probably the first scientific description of regeneration in crustaceans, by Réaumur 1712 The paper starts like this: Scholars are as wary of the marvellous as common people are ready to believe it. ... 🧵 1/3

Tribolium Brainbow plasmids are now available at www.addgene.org/browse/artic...

Mapping neurons in the brain of a beetle, by Gregor Bucher's team @bucherlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Happy we could make a minor contribution by providing a Brainbow construct, which the team used to map neuronal projections Tribolium Brainbow soon available on Addgene

we're on the cover!

The paper we just published is a collaboration of 12 labs spread across 7 countries, covering sea squirt (shown here), sea urchin, beetle, crustacean, roundworm, ragworm, flatworm, jellyfish, sea anemone & choanoflagellate. Comparing the results identified tags that work well across many species 7/9

Irene's first tests looked promising, so we started sharing our toolkit with colleagues who could try it in a wide range of species. The wider the better. We advertised on social media, sent to @addgene.bsky.social, and shared these strips through the post and at meetings. It was great fun. 6/9

Our colleague Mette had already sent me a few tags, but we wanted to try more. We searched papers, discussed with colleagues and came up with 11 candidates, targeting the membrane by different routes. We prepared them in a way that would be easy to apply in different species (by injecting mRNA). 5/9

Two years ago, Irene Karapidaki and I were looking for tags we could use in the crustacean Parhyale, to study how they regenerate their legs after injury. We had movies of regenerating legs where cell nuclei are visible (using nucleus-localising tags) but the shapes of cells were invisible. 4/9

Several membrane-localising tags have been described in well-studied 'model' organisms, but these do not always work well in other species. Here is an example in crustacean embryos: on the left is a tag that works well, on the right is one that gets stuck inside the cell. 3/9

These images show live embryos of animals (jellyfish, crustacean, worm, sea urchin, sea squirt, beetle) and one of animals closest single-celled relatives. They were captured taking advantage of fluorescent proteins localised on the outer membrane of cells, allowing us to observe cell outlines. 1/9

We found something that looked like aquilina, but identification of this species is tough and only reliable in males. We collected aquilina-like males and the females they coupled with, hoping for the best. Genome sequencing later confirmed that we had the right species. /8

Later, in September 2023 I spent a month in the north of Greece, with my daughter Marta who was doing anthropology fieldwork in the Pomak villages above Xanthi. I met Chryssa Anastasiadou at a fisheries institute near Kavala and we went collecting in the area, with her colleague Pavlos Vidoris. /7

Parhyale plumicornis was there, right under my nose! Over a week I collected from the rocky shores ~20 individuals. They travelled well back to Lyon and started a culture that's still running after 3.5 years. /6

A few months later I was on holidays in Milos, in the Cyclades, a place I visit almost every summer in the last 25 years. I brought a portable stereoscope and collected some amphipods a few hundred metres from where we lived. /5

In May 2022 we met Oliver Coleman at the Natural History Museum of Berlin, just a few months before he retired. The museum collections are quite poor on Parhyale, but meeting Olli was great! /4

We searched along the rocky coast for 3 days; we could only find 3 individuals /3

Farzaneh sent us some Parhyale darvishi, preserved in ethanol. Sabrina offered to help us collect Parhyale plumicornis in Sicily. In April 2022 Mathilde and I travelled to Sicily; we set up a basic lab in a flat in Trapani, with a stereoscope from Palermo /2

Οur recent preprint includes data from 3 new Parhyale species: aquilina & plumicornis from the Mediterranean, darvishi from the Persian Gulf I started looking for such species in 2021. Amphipod expert Oliver Coleman gave me some key contacts: Farzaneh Momtazi (Iran) & Sabrina Lo Brutto (Palermo) /1

These approaches allow us to narrow down the search for cis-reg elements and to search genome-wide for elements with particular properties. This has allowed us to identify ubiquitous, muscle- and neuron-specific cis elements, driving robust expression of transgenic reporter constructs. /3

We combined 2 approaches to identify cis-reg elements. First, we produced bulk & single nucleus ATACseq data, to focus on sequences that are accessible for gene regulation. Second, we sequenced the genomes of 3 additional Parhyale spp, to identify islands of seq conservation across the genome. /2

Mapping of NGS reads to a reference genome @mbsj-official.bsky.social

"This cover depicts The Bridge in the NGS Rain where people are being exposed to torrents of genomic information [...]. The man standing in the middle of the bridge is pictured deep in thought, considering how to utilize this sequence data set of the ALDH2 gene." @mbsj-official.bsky.social

Just discovered the wonderful covers of 'Genes to Cells', the journal of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan @mbsj-official.bsky.social – absolutely beautiful! here some examples inspired by mitosis, CRISPR, the DNA helix, and plant pigments

À quoi ressemble le quotidien dans un laboratoire de recherche ? En 2025, Arthur Monternier, étudiant en art, a passé six mois dans notre laboratoire. Il raconte son expérience dans cette bande dessinée. popsciences.universite-lyon.fr/ressources/l... popsciences.universite-lyon.fr/app/uploads/...

Happy new year to all! (photo by Karl Blossfeldt, Art Forms in Nature, 1928)

That's what 'the napolitans' we up to when they briefly invaded our lab! Wonderful memories from December 2021 and November 2022. Congratulations!!

Our ultimate goal: exploring biology beyond well established research organisms, by building tools that will make new things visible Ending 🧵 with a marker for visualising chanoflagellates, closest unicellular relatives of animals, by @jujumathieu.bsky.social and @thibautbrunet.bsky.social

By studying these markers in a multiple organisms, we could identify ones that label the cell membrane most clearly and consistently across species (circle sizes represent how well markers perform in each species). Gathering the info involved more than 10 research labs. see doi.org/10.1101/2024... 🧵