Spring PhD recruitment round @crick.ac.uk is now open and we have a project on offer: www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud.... If you have a background in maths or physics and are curious about patterning and growth in biology this could be the project for you! Please help us spread the word 💥
Advanced grad students + postdocs: apply for the 2026 #kitpqbio summer course, "Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals," at buff.ly/OXXMKEv. Apply by Feb. 1.
Course directors Adrienne Roeder (Cornell) and Sebastian Streichan (UCSB)
How can cells use information from neighboring cells to improve the spatial precision of morphogen patterns? 🤔
We show that cells can gain positional information by "talking" to their neighbors - how much depends critically on spatial correlations of the patterns.
buff.ly/w56OUJT
🔬 New paper in Developmental Biology 🐟
Our researchers have now tested a largely ignored hypothesis—that the geometry of an embryo drives its development. Read more in the 🧵below.
📷 Zebrafish in ISTA’s Aquatic Facility.
Are you looking for a PhD in Biological Physics / Math Biology? We are recruiting at UCL, link to apply now active:
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Project very flexible, drop me a line if you are interested and want to find out more.
Researchers have identified a signalling feedback loop that may have been vital to the evolution of insect wings and therefore flight.
The signals, called morphogens, act like lighthouses in most developing tissues, guiding nearby cells towards their fate.
www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-11...
An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments
Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Looking forward to this meeting!! Join us this February in Heidelberg 🦋🪰🐟🐁🌱🧫🦠
🔊 We are looking for a PhD student to join our group and the vibrant community @ucl.ac.uk @ucl-ipls.bsky.social and @crick.ac.uk 💥. Details on the call: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPF708/5... and our project on offer: ucl-epsrc-dtp.github.io/2026-27-proj.... Please share and drop me a line if interested!
And for anyone that wants a preview, have a watch of @crick.ac.uk most watched video on TikTok where @danafd.bsky.social shares more about her shark work vm.tiktok.com/ZNdcRfrNd/ 🦈🔥
Watch this space for some beautiful forebrain data across beasts and species 🦈🐭🐣
Couldn’t be prouder of the first PhD graduate of the lab, super congrats @danafd.bsky.social 🙌🎓🌟. Such a pleasure to supervise you together with @cohouart.bsky.social @houartlab.bsky.social, the learning journey never ends 😌. Huge thanks to @jamesasharpe.bsky.social and Sylvie Retaux for examining 💥
Opportunity for a Master’s/Bachelor’s student:
- Join us for up to 5 months 🗓️
- Build computational/mathematical models 💻
- Learn about genotype-phenotype maps and evolution 🧬
- Work closely with PhD student Manuela Giraud - full info here:
www.crg.eu/en/content/t...
We're now recruiting early career group leaders at the Crick to lead ambitious research programmes and explore bold scientific questions.
Hear our Director, Edith Heard, explain why the Crick is a unique place for curiosity-driven research.
Apply now ➡️ www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...
Don’t miss the exciting ISSCR Webinar: Integrating Biophysics into Stem Cell Biology next Tuesday October 14!
The webinar features paired tandem talks that brings together experimentalists and theorists working at the interface of stem cell biology and biophysics. 1/2
www.isscr.org/upcoming-pro...
Latest from ours: www.cell.com/cell-reports...
This is two stories in one: a case study/cautionary tale on developing genetic tools in new organisms, and the first hint at a gene regulatory network for choanoflagellate multicellular development (which turn out to involve a Hippo/YAP/ECM loop!) A 🧵
Motivated graduates with backgrounds in biological or biomedical sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and/or computer science are invited to apply to our 4-year fully funded PhD programme.
Apply by 05 November 2025
www.crick.ac.uk/careers-and-...
We have a PhD project here, along with many other cool projects:
"Characterising and predicting seizure onsets from longitudinal sEEG data",
www.crick.ac.uk/careers-and-...
with @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social (Crick), Torsten Baldeweg (UCL) and Martin Tisdall (UCL).
Apply by: 14 November 2025.
LMB PhD studentship available in the Baum lab to use informatics to infer cell structure from genomic data in collaboration with the brilliant Tom Williams. If you write to me and I don’t reply - try again - the spam filter is hungry…
New research from EMBL scientists is shedding light on how shape transitions help tissue boundaries form during development.
The results reveal a new class of adaptive material dynamics & could provide design principles for smart materials that respond to changing environments.
Come join us in Basel! @biozentrum.unibas.ch is an amazing place to start your group.
Can pressure gradients persist over long timescales in animal cells? We induced intracellular pressure gradients and examined the resulting flows in single cells. We reveal surprisingly long lasting pressure gradients.
More here: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Happy birthday Rita!
Our latest preprint! Into morphogenesis, Yap, ECM, signaling, vertex models, feedbacks/robustness? There is something here for everyone. We discovered a positive feedback loop that extends inner ear canals, and a built-in mechanism that shuts it down when morphogenesis is done. tinyurl.com/464wsjhd
Thanks Flor :)
Kudos to Alicia Donoghue from the Fernandes lab for the beautiful experiments, our own Lewis Mosby who was behind most of the theoretical work and everyone involved, it's been such fun putting the pieces together for this one. Would love to hear feedback!
So juxtacrine and temporally dynamic signals can themselves carry and refine positional information, augmenting that provided by morphogens to enable robust, fine-grained patterning.
This is all orchestrated by Glia morphogenesis: wrapping glia act as timekeepers, ensuring that cells differentiate after Hh and Notch patterns are established in each lamina column.
But the relationship between Hh and Notch goes beyond that: Notch restricts Hh expression in lamina cells, which results in the first, and only the first, cell in each column in the lamina expressing Hh, and does so at the right time.
It turns out that the Hh gradient is not sufficient on its own to specify all neuronal fates (also see elifesciences.org/articles/78093). Instead, we show that the combination of Notch and Hh activities together determine what neuron a cell is destined to be
