Peter Carlton

How do sea anemones make babies? I couldn’t be more excited about the publication of my second PhD project. The synaptonemal complex proteins expressed by the Nematostella genome show remarkable similarities to vertebrates. BUT functionally there are distinct architectural differences! Bonus fun

Our recent paper on CCAN organization was just out in #Science Advances. We combined MD simulation with expansion microscopy to observe an interesting structure in the kinetochore. Congrats, Yuji Sakai, Mariko Ariuyoshi, and Yasu Hirano !! Please check it out. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The key was supposed to be bleem, not 4

the e-Mudhra allied with the Skeksis, got it

I'm very happy to have an airgapped linux box that's been turned off, sat in a corner of the room, since 2024. With a mirror of a subset of wikipedia and gutenberg, and a library of appropriate technology/survival etc PDFs. Nethack and Stockfish too! I'll never allow it to connect to anything again.

Exciting work from the Yumi Kim lab! Shining more light on the synaptonemal complex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Out today in @jcb.org! Work from the Mogessie, Fachinetti & Redemann labs reveals how CENP-A/B/C cooperate to maintain kinetochore function in oocytes and how declining centromere strength predisposes aging eggs to aneuploidy. doi.org/10.1083/jcb.... @health.pew.org @valleefoundation.bsky.social

It finally happened: I'm preparing to switch back to Zotero for reference management, and searched if there were any Zotero↔Slack notification integrations; the AI response was "Yes [you blockhead], you made one 9 years ago at github.com/pmcarlton/zo... !" (not a very good solution, but it worked)

This is a fully visually evident proof of the fact that the diagonal of a regular unit pentagon is the golden ratio. arxiv.org/abs/2610.18903

Register for this webinar to join @cilialab.bsky.social @florianjug.bsky.social and me for what I hope will be a productive discussion on AI in microscopy:

Researchers from cilia biology and microscopy, as well as primary ciliary dyskinesia clinicians, have written an open letter to Nikon regarding the winning video in their Small World in Motion competition. To read the open letter and find out how to add you name:

Now, the next chapter! Our lab at the Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, is fully up and running. We are actively recruiting passionate researchers at all levels to tackle bold ideas in cell biology, chromosome architecture, and evolution: sites.google.com/view/ecg-lab...

Want to enhance your image analysis skills with napari? We’re running a two-day training event on how to use napari to effectively analyse your bioimaging data. 🕒 Applications close on 15 September. Learn more and apply 👇 www.crick.ac.uk/whats-on/cbi...

Not real data here in this example but I am really enjoying interactive #terminal plotting… 2 tmux panes with ssh replicating ~90% of what I usually do with jupyter.

Here's a balanced account of where the microscopy community stands on AI use by this year's Small World in Motion winner. My main issue is that no one seems to have seen the original data despite requests (no mention of it being reviewed by the organizers) www.the-scientist.com/allegations-...

Here is an amazing 1960's video from a company that once cared deeply about quality, starting with making their own glass www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwej...

The response from Nikon makes me wonder whether tools marketed by Nikon were used: www.microscope.healthcare.nikon.com/en_EU/produc...

From the new info my bet is fluo labeling inference pushed to 11. Hallucinating nonsensical DAPI nuclei, mitochondria stain, membrane labeling from a kind of phase contrast image: wrong localization, wrong scale, wrong movement. Keeping this movie as SWiM winner is a disgrace to the competition

Human cilia disease specialist on the Small World in Motion winning movie

Out today in Nature: sex without crossovers. Rhynchospora tenuis makes pollen, fertilises and sets seed, yet 0 crossovers in 10,997 pollen nuclei. Chromosome drive and ~87% seed abortion rebuild the mother's genotype, so the offspring are clones. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Happy to share that this paper is now published in Nature Genetics! Grateful to everyone who supported this work throughout this long journey. I’m proud to see it out! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Is euchromatin really “open”? 🧬 Using super-resolution imaging🔬 our new study @natgenet.nature.com reveals: Euchromatin forms condensed domains in live cells. Cohesin constrains them and prevents domain mixing for proper transcriptional insulation🚧 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... (1/2)

Our paper on euchromatin and cohesin is now published!!🙌 Euchromatin forms condensed domains, and cohesin constrains their local mixing. This organization maintains transcriptional insulation. This work was truly a team effort, and I’m grateful to everyone who contributed to it.

Back from an unforgettable trip to Indonesia! First, a weekend of discussing study opportunities with highly motivated students. Then, a few days waiting for a volcano to let us fly home. Glad to have spent 5 days in Jakarta, but have really just scratched the surface of an amazing city and country.

Anak Krakatau has calmed down enough to let us slip out of Jakarta tonight; hopefully it will stay that way for a long time.

1/ out in @science.org! We found a new asymmetry in large-scale chromosome structure: sister chromatids are shifted by hundreds of kb in the 5′→3′ direction of their inherited strands! A close collaboration w/ @gerlichlab.bsky.social , led by @flaviacorsi.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

modern terminals are amazing, it hasn't been this good since Tektronix emulation in xterm.

I spent 16 years in the SF Bay Area, and have lived 16 more in Kansai, Japan where I'll most likely stay for the rest of my life, but this picture depicts one uniquely representative frame from my permanently imprinted birthplace (Seattle/Salish Sea)

🇦🇺↔🇯🇵 for undergrad/masters students studying in Australia and interested in short-term research opportunities this summer (Jan 7 – Feb 18 2027) - please check out Kyoto University's KU-STAR program: www.kugd.k.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/ku-star-p... ! Application deadline is Sep. 25, happy to take questions.

My brain entertaining me this morning

Is Claude, let alone his pal Jimmy "Trust me bro" the Feckless, out there deciphering hundreds of pages of unconventionally-spelled scrawl and vanished words across a dozen text variants that require chemistry experiments to fully settle?

The Sasaki lab at the National Institute of Genetics in Japan are seeking for highly motivated PhD students to work on extrachromosomal circular DNA, gene amplification, genome stability, and cancer genome dynamics, starting in October 2027. Please see below and apply by August 31.

Really nice article laying out the semantics of sex/sexes that causes persistent confusion and arguing in our community. It lays out the undisputed patterns in biology and makes clear any "lack of consensus" on sex/sexes is arguing across different levels. academic.oup.com/icb/article/...

Our latest publication is on bioRχiv! — a study of the meiotic double-strand break machinery, focused on C. elegans but using the extensive genomic resources available for the whole genus to learn more about how SPO-11 and its cofactors work together to break DNA www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

ZHP-2/HEI10 generates CO precursors and triggers procrossover factor coarsening and CO formation through Polo kinase recruitment https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.26.740636v1

Since it's entered the zeitgeist again, I will take a moment to thank Carolyn Dewald who taught me the Odýsseia at USC and inspired me to memorize its first stanzas in Greek, which I still remember. That class continued into the modern age and pretty much established my tastes as a reader.

This is what they took from us (ok, I still have the album, but !) #nusrat #ustadnusratfatehalikhan

I just had this conversarion with an editor yesterday. If you start hedging for imagined bad faith readers, you have stopped writing and started journaling a fan fic to them.

by Jove, I think that's all of them… 30+ more genomes on the way sometime soon, I do hope, but for now here are 54 Caenorhabditis SPO-11s

Does anyone else have songs or albums you can't listen to until a certain obligation is done with? anyway, really eager to submit something to bioRχiv next week.

Crossover: hanging by a COSA-2 thread @ethanewe.bsky.social highlights work from @celjauebel.bsky.social & colleagues demonstrating the complex molecular machinery required to maintain the fidelity of meiotic recombination. #preprint #DevBio #preLight ⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/d...

During my 書道 class I heard from down the hall the unmistakable sound of a group of 20 or so people going through Carmina Burana, and felt a surprisingly strong urge to put down the brush and go join them. Vade retro, for now

Tadasu Nozaki of UMass Amherst and an MBL Whitman Fellow is trying to better understand the complex movements that allow chromosomes to pair. 🔗 Read the full story here: go.mbl.edu/nozaki

Probably too many nuclei are generated in total, but the eggs/apoptosis numbers look good. Here is some simple stem cell lineage tracing - I wonder if this picture is correct, that after a few days all the meiotic cells in a gonad arm descend from a single progenitor?

Messing around with C. elegans gonad arm simulation, with a goal in mind to reproduce things like RAD-51 focus distribution through the germline

The vast array of Unicode glyphs should get more attention in command line tools; this is one good use I've found for the box-drawing characters:

My first PhD paper is out in Nucleic Acids Research! We describe "Ab-trapping" - an antibody artifact that distorts assays relying on antibody diffusion (microscopy, CUT&Tag, CUT&RUN). The revisions made the story much stronger. Check it out! doi.org/10.1093/nar/...