Critical points and transitions in embryo development
Our PhD student, Laura, has successfully defended her PhD thesis titled “Uncoupling adhesion- and density-driven rigidity transitions triggers epithelial organisation in embryonic tissues” at Heidelberg University. She studied the role of control parameters regulating tissue material phase…
A new preprint on the PhD project of Lena is out on bioRxiv! Lena’s project focused on how cellular timing heterogeneity coincides with and regulates a tissue rigidity transition at the onset of zebrafish morphogenesis. She shows that cell cycle length heterogeneity emerges from the stochastic…
PhD student from our lab, Laura, has received the Best Poster award at the recent “Mechanobiology across the tree of life” conference at EMBL Heidelberg. Congratulations, Laura!
Our new paper is out in Nature Physics! This work focuses on how different control parameters regulate different types of tissue phase transitions, which in turn affect tissue organisation. By uncoupling transitions that are cell density- and cell-cell-adhesion-dependent, this work demonstrates…
The first paper from our lab, titled “Tissue rigidity phase transition shapes morphogen gradients,” has been published in Nature Cell Biology! The work explores how tissue-scale mechanics is linked to morphogen signaling and for the first time shows how these parameters dynamically tune…
A new collaborative preprint with the group of Bernat Corominas-Murtra, University of Graz, Austria, on how developmental timing of early embryogenesis is regulated across metazoans is out! We find that cell duplication of early embryos is evolutionarily constrained by the enzymatic kinetics of…
The postdoctoral fellow in our lab, Jlenia, has won a scholarship from the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation, awarded to outstanding female scientists with children. Congratulations, Jlenia! The CNV Foundation was founded in 2004 by Professor Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, a developmental…
Lisa has joined the lab recently as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She comes from Sweden, where she did both her bachelor’s and master’s in engineering physics and applied physics. She recently obtained her PhD at UC Santa Barbara, where she worked on cellular stress response in cancer…
The new review from our lab exploring the roles of tissue phase transitions in embryonic development is out! The article focuses not only on the function of these transitions in tissue deformation, but also highlights their non-canonical role in shaping tissue reorganisation and signalling.
This December, we celebrated the 5th anniversary of the lab, which started with the Laser Tag game (thanks to Karen for the organization!) and ended with a delicious Christmas dinner cooked by our group leader and a bad & good Secret Santa game. Thanks a lot to everyone for fun!