Lionel Christiaen, PhD (he/him/his)

Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations Nature Reviews Genetics - In this Perspective, Maizels and Briscoe discuss the limitations of current models of gene regulatory networks and outline solutions to harness data abundance without...

New Perspective form Rory Maizels & me: "Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations"

Gene regulatory networks are supposed to give us mechanistic explanations of development, so why are we drowning in 'hairballs' of statistical correlations?

rdcu.be/e7zx7

Via @wacswain.bsky.social
“Royal Society statement on the US Administration’s repeal of the endangerment finding”

Today, Michelle and I are proud to announce that we will be hosting the dedication ceremony for the Obama Presidential Center on June 18th in Chicago, and welcoming the public on June 19th.

We can’t wait for you to visit. Go to obama.org to learn more.

Amniogenesis in embryos and stem cell models - Nature Cell Biology This Review discusses the mechanisms underlying both cavitation and folding amniogenesis and provides an overview of the various recent stem cell-based human embryo models that have been developed to ...

Timely review on an important support tissue in development.

Thank you for highlighting our work!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fitting time for this cover.

open.spotify.com/track/5OQjEC...

🚨Seeking developmental or cell biologists🔬!🚨
Our department @ucl-cdb.bsky.social is looking to support scientists seeking to establish their lab with a fellowship. Deadline: 30 Jan. Apply here: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Really excited to share our new paper in @nature.com! We uncovered how a physical instability of the cytoplasm coupled with the cell cycle drives cytoplasmic partitioning in early embryos #zebrafish #drosophila. Read more in this🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🤩
@poldresden.bsky.social @mpi-cbg.de

View of snowy foreground and brown/green mountainous background with blue sky

Brown/green mountain terrain with patches of snow and light clouds on a blue sky in the background

A wooden bench in the foreground of a mountainous landscape with a frozen lake, pine trees and a blue sky in the background

Views of a very #SunnyBergen weekend to cleanse y’all’s timelines

L'étreinte amoureuse de l'Univers, de la Terre (Mexique), de moi-même, de Diego et du Señor Xólotl - Frida Khalo, 1949.
Source : Musée d'art moderne, Mexico 🇲🇽

“The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

- Marcus Aurelius

#CleanStoicism
#StoicQuotes
#Stoicism
#Mindfulness

NIH is not issuing awards. You may think that it's because they it is coming up with new directions of research...The apposite is true.

Here is a graph showing how many fewer new funding opportunities that NIH has posted over time.

-91%, a trend that started on Jan 2025.

Cool paper alert. Was trying to model the thermal performance curves of several farmed seaweed species and ran across this awesome, theoretical unifying paper: “A universal thermal performance curve arises in biology and ecology” www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Devastating.

Visual with the text: Info day on research infrastructures

(1/3) A new call for proposals to support projects advancing research infrastructures (RIs) in the EU is opening soon.

Attend the info day to get ready to apply for #HorizonEU funding 🧪

Before the event, watch the recorded sessions & submit your questions via Slido: link.europa.eu/DPcF4k

Measles was wiped out in the U.S. 25 years ago and now we’re already past 1,000 cases in February because vaccination rates dropped below the safety line. This is what happens when public health gets gutted and people stop trusting basic science.

A vibrant color photograph of renowned American marine biologist and ichthyologist Eugenie Clark, known as the "Shark Lady," captured in her element during a dive or research expedition. She is wearing a large diving mask pushed up on her forehead, snorkel attached, and a wetsuit or dive gear. She smiles broadly and joyfully while partially submerged in clear ocean water, surrounded by bubbles, with her face lit by sunlight reflecting off the surface. A large white buoy or float and underwater scenery are visible in the background, conveying her lifelong passion for studying sharks and marine life, her pioneering work in shark behavior, and her role as one of the first prominent female scientists in oceanography.

An underwater photograph of a bull shark swimming gracefully in deep blue ocean waters, captured from a slightly below and side angle. The shark has a robust, heavy-set body with a blunt snout, small black eyes, and a grayish-brown upper body fading to a lighter underside. Its dorsal fin is prominent, pectoral fins are broad, and several remora fish cling to its back near the tail. Sunlight filters from above, creating beams and highlights on the shark's skin as it glides with an open mouth revealing rows of sharp teeth, evoking the powerful yet often misunderstood nature of this coastal species known for its adaptability and occasional aggression toward humans.

Ichthyologist Eugenie Clark, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘓𝘢𝘥𝘺, died #OTD in 2015. A pioneer in scuba diving for research purposes, she proved sharks are capable of learning and was a world authority on Tetraodontiformes. She founded Mote Marine Lab and used her fame to drive global marine conservation. #WomenInSTEM

One week left to register to the Bioimage Analysis with AI course in Pasteur!

This June, 1 - 5.

I give a bit more details in the thread below
👇

Chronic ocean heating fuels ‘staggering’ loss of marine life, study finds Fish levels fall by 7.2% with as little as 0.1C of warming per decade, northern hemisphere research shows

“A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small. But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life.”

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

New morphometric analysis tool developed by Lu et al. applied to skeletal muscle cross-sections of four different juvenile teleost fish species. Main finding: Mosaic hyperplasia, i.e., the addition of new myofibers in the deep myotome, is near-zero in the small Danionella but dramatically enhanced in the giant danio relative to the intermediate grower zebrafish, establishing this mode of hyperplasia as a main driver of skeletal muscle growth in differently sized fishes.

Beautiful work led by Yansong (Kevin) Lu on skeletal muscle growth in zebrafish, giant danio, Danionella cerebrum, and killifish. HCR, new image analysis tool, scRNA-seq, and CRISPR. New international collaborations between Uni Melbourne, NCVC/Osaka, Stanford & ARMI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to share scHiCAR, an ultra-high throughout (millions of cells), low cost (5 cents/cell including NGS), and trimodal platform for integrated single-cell level analysis of mRNA, open chromatin, and 5-kb resolution looping with ground-truth data the same individual cell.

Without bloated military, how do you maintain the $ as go-to currency and sustain that level of deficit? Just asking…

Always great to be back at the Kerckhoff Marine Lab. @caltech.edu

We overlapped in the Levine lab, and credited his crazy idea of looking for a second heart field in Ciona with an authorship on our 2010 Science paper. He is a good guy, and I was a bit tough on him because he could also be so irritating. 😂 tough love

Or lack thereof

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🤩🤩🤩🤩Well isn’t this Alex Mori sitting right next to you?

Are you interested in Comparative Developmental Biology? Great opportunity for grad students and Postdocs to take this 2 week course at the MBL in October 2026.

Registration is OPEN for the 2026 Santa Cruz Meeting on Developmental Biology!!! #scdb26

@flybase.bsky.social @zfinmod.bsky.social @alliancegenome.bsky.social @insdb.bsky.social @isdb.bsky.social @geneticssociety.bsky.social @bsdb.bsky.social @ascbiology.bsky.social

scdb2026.sites.ucsc.edu

Review: Viral genome editing methods and applications in the CRISPR era
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

a cartoon of a man sitting at a table with a lot of food . ALT: a cartoon of a man sitting at a table with a lot of food .

So the top 0.1% eat more than 50% of all the food?