Here's a beautiful #microscopy image from our PoL Photo Competition 📸
👨🔬 🔬©️ Image taken by Yogishree Arabinda Panda, PhD student in the Fischer-Friedrich group @fischerfriedriclab.bsky.social
🔍 Caption: A SEM micrograph of a mitotically arrested HeLa cell with visible filopodia membrane reservoirs
Great essay on a timeless question! "The complexity of life is not pre-encoded in the genome, but emerges through development in a way that is not fully captured by the mechanical metaphors of blueprints and computer codes".
Hello epithelial mechanics fans!! I’m Juanma @juanmagararc.bsky.social 👋 I work on cell mechanics (see celldynamicslab.com) and use Flipper-TR FLIM to probe membrane biophysics in cells.
Join me on this tour about Flipper: what it measures, strengths, advice, cool case studies, and cute drawings!
Roffay, C., Molinard, G., ..., & Roux, A. (2021). Passive coupling of membrane tension and cell volume during active response of cells to osmosis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(47), e2103228118. #EpithelialMechanics
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Happy to highlight our collaborative work from our @ijmonod.bsky.social team with @destriano.bsky.social, B. Goyeau and M. Chabanon.
Cytoplasmic crowding acts as a porous medium that hinders macromolecular diffusivity.
Plus: a clever way to measure cell volume.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
This weekend we projected cells and filaments on the roof of the @museeorsay.bsky.social in Paris, then we contracted it with a pinch of myosin.
And it was fabulous!
Grateful to have been part of this art/science project & thx to @manuelthery.bsky.social @lblanchoin.bsky.social & the CytoMorphoLab
Alberto Dinelli, Ludovic Dumoulin, Karsten Kruse: Active topological strings in renewing nematopolar fluids https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18307 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18307 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.18307
Thanks for the nice thread ! 👏
I was wondering how podosomes differ from lamellipodial protrusions ? Do they protrude more transversaly towards the substrate ?
How do cells orchestrate themselves to achieve a directional movement as a group?
Hi, I’m @sayukihirano.bsky.social. In this thread, I’ll highlight key mechanisms of how cells communicate with each other to perform directional collective migration.
New preprint! We show how mesoscopic nonequilibrium fluctuations in active gels emerge from the breaking of detailed balance at the molecular scale. Warning: Long technical paper ahead! Enjoy! @mpipks.bsky.social @ub.edu @ubics.bsky.social @icreacommunity.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2601.20483
Reported in #JCellBiol, a method developed in the lab of Associate Professor Danielle Grotjahn (@nanigrotjahn.bsky.social) measures membrane thickness directly inside intact cells and identifies ATP synthase clusters in curved, unusually thick membrane regions.
Guillaume Pernollet shows that epithelial cells adjust their shape to locally flatten, forming scutoids for any geometry, changing our view of cell packing. Thanks to all! @clairedessalles.bsky.social @juanmagararc.bsky.social @sciencesunige.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
How can embryos use pulsatile contraction to shape tissue development during morphogenesis? I'm @weiyiqian.bsky.social and with this thread I want to introduce the roles of pulsatile actomyosin in animal development and the mechanisms that drive actomyosin to pulse
How can structures at the vertex of 3 cells have effects at the tissue level?
Join me, @laura-rustarazo.bsky.social, to explore how tricellular junctions (TCJs) act as local tension sensors and regulators of global tissue organization. 🧵⤵️ doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Happy 2026!
May this year be good for your cells,
Discovering all the cool
#EpithelialMechanics as well.
Janssen, V., & Huveneers, S. (2024). Cell–cell junctions in focus–imaging junctional architectures and dynamics at high resolution. Journal of Cell Science, #EpithelialMechanicsReview doi.org/10.1242/jcs....
New paper out!
We show how mechanosensitive adherens junction proteins link actomyosin contractility to actin assembly using in vitro reconstitution.
Huge congrats to Aurélie Favarin, Rayan Said, & all authors!
In Science Advances: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#actin #myosin #mechanobiology
Malboubi, M., Esteki, M. H., Vaghela, M. B., Korsak, L. I. T., Petrie, R. J., Moeendarbary, E., & Charras, G. (2025). The cytoplasm of living cells can sustain transient and steady intracellular pressure gradients. Elife. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
#EpithelialMechanics
Tristan Guyomar and I wrote a review on physical mechanisms coordinating regeneration - Featured: signalling/mechanical gradients, travelling waves and nematic fields - Dramatis personae: axolotls, hydra, planaria, spiny mice and zebrafish (ofc) with a jellyfish cameo
tinyurl.com/3upzrdbs
Non-motile microbes are not prisoners of diffusive transport. Just their metabolic activity can be sufficient to stir up the ambient fluid and cause explosive long-range dispersal -- a "metabolic firework".
Our latest work -- arxiv.org/abs/2512.16288
Leybova, L., Biswas, A., Sharan, R., Trejo, B. M., Kim, K., ..., Phillips, B. K., & Devenport, D. (2024). Radially patterned morphogenesis of murine hair follicle placodes ensures robust epithelial budding. Developmental cell, 59(24), 3272–3289.e5. #EpithelialMechanics
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Now that you have gathered you raw data from a cell migration assay, how do you analyze that data?
In our review, we describe methods - including AI methods - to track migrating cells and extract as much information as possible.
Read our paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Thank you Nimesh for the nice thread, very useful indeed 🙏👏
Cytoskeleton shapes tissues during development. What signaling drives these changes?
I'm @onenimesa.bsky.social and let's explore FGF signaling's crucial role with examples.
Trust me, you need to know this!
Meet the Epithelial Mechanics Fan Club @epimechfc.bsky.social
Nimesh Chahare @onenimesa.bsky.social and Julia Eckert @juliaeckert.bsky.social introduce us to the Epithelial Mechanics Fan Club.
Learn how you can get involved with this community: focalplane.biologists.com/2025/12/04/e...
New paper alert! We report that #zebrafish endodermal cells use contact inhibition of locomotion as a dispersal and spacing mechanism. It’s a neat example of large-scale patterns emerging from local interactions using a simple set of rules. Summary in the thread below 1/9
doi.org/10.1016/j.is...
Ruppel, A., Wörthmüller, D., Misiak, V., Kelkar, M., Wang, I., Moreau, P., Méry, A., ..., Schwarz, U. S., & Balland, M. (2023). Force propagation between epithelial cells depends on active coupling and mechano-structural polarization. eLife, 12, e83588. #EpithelialMechanics
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Hinderling, L., Hadorn, R., Kwasny, M., Frei, J., Grädel, B., Psalmon, S., Blum, Y., ..., Riveline, D., & Pertz, O. (2025). Teach your microscope how to print: low-cost and rapid-iteration microfabrication for biology. Lab on a chip, 25(16), 4091–4105. #EpithelialMechanics
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Hello, here is a review I wrote about how cells sometimes try to synchronise with surrounding cells so that they can do a good job of building tissues during development. It is called "Keeping up with the neighbours"
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
#DevBio 🧪
Cells can sense the geometry of their environment, from tiny subcellular features to whole-tissue patterns. How can we engineer environments to systematically probe these responses?
🧵 I'm @lhinderling.bsky.social from @olivierpertz.bsky.social lab, let’s do a short tour on microfabrication!
