Kirsty Wan

Do #tintinnids dream of electric sheep? 🤯 Here is a single cell capable of building a lorica and living inside it for protection... it also swims, feeds, hunts Can even detect and habituate to mechanical cues! #celllearning #protistsonsky #cilia Read more in our preprint doi.org/10.64898/202...

Despite social, economic and institutional barriers limiting women’s formal participation in science, they made numerous key breakthroughs.

An old friend asked if I had any videos of cilia laying around for her class to see. I dug up this one from about 10 years ago and it could maybe win a prize for 'most similar to a wacky waving inflatable tube man'.

PhD position in arctic protists at the Natural History Museum in Oslo #arctic #marine #protists #diversity #ecology #metabarcoding

Here is our new collaborative paper on the origin of cholinergic and monoaminergic signaling. The data suggest that biogenic amine signaling is thus not a bilaterian innovation but an ancient mode of cellular communication that evolved from generalist to […] [Original post on biologists.social]

Happy #FluorescenceFriday! To continue with the October theme, please enjoy this microscopic "pumpkin". This is the nucleus of an NIH3T3 cell shown in 🟠 and the primary cilium in 🟢 - 🔬 by @stjuderesearch.bsky.social grad student Christina Wang 🎃 🧪

Lise Meitner was the 2nd woman to earn a physics PhD at the Univ of Vienna and Germany’s first female physics professor. She fled Nazi Germany, helped explain nuclear fission, and has an element named for her. 49 Nobel nominations, she never won. Her male colleague did. #SheShed #VivaHerAlliance

Love this little article about all the beautiful appendages found in the microscopic world! #flagella #archaella #cilia The best part: no AI in sight! (next time I will need to put some scalebars on! 😉)

European Union, Marie Curie, EMBO should triple postdoc fellowships! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

From bioRxiv to PNAS! 🎉 Very happy to see our paper “Diversity and spatial segregation of TRP channels in the closest relatives of animals” now published in @pnas.org. Another piece in the puzzle of how animal cell signalling evolved. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Out today in @nature.com: our review on how single cells evolve into multicellular organisms. With Ozan Bozdag, @kaitong25.bsky.social, Peter Yunker, and @matthewherron.bsky.social. rdcu.be/9ZuiKow9twKa For an overview, check out the video below.

Microscopy images are scientific evidence, and that image processing must be transparent and faithful to the underlying biology. Reinforce those standards, especially now-insist Nikon uphold them. #NikonSWiM2026 Read the letter: tinyurl.com/OpenLetterSW... Add your name: forms.gle/TyGRELnCxq5z...

yes so happy for him!!! this is exactly why we do curiosity-driven science... #chlamydomonas #protistsonsky Funders and universities are you watching...???

Having seen the news: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... thought I'd share a cilia movie captured at UCL GOS ICH with Eriomina Shahaj & Vanesa Papastavrou using simple DIC on a Nikon Ti2 with DIC at 60x1.4. 500 fps here slowed down 20 times. Processed with Nikon's denoiseAI and an unsharp mask in Fiji.

Our paper on the dynamics of Asgard archaea (Promethearchaeota) is now out in Nature! Huge thanks to the reviewers for helping make the manuscript stronger. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Two “Lokis” stained for Lokiactin (FastAct, magenta), reaching toward each other to celebrate 🎉 #archaea

Move over C. elegans... single celled protist wriggles forwards and backwards! Check out the beautiful ciliary metachronal waves #didinium #protistsonsky

ooh Bluesky can do videos now... here's an emergency #cilia movie

We heard through the vines that #cilia are hot (or not?) right now so here is a cool article by the Saxena lab about how Notch signalling inhibit zebrafish olfactory multiciliated cells differentiation 🐟 AND we got a cool movie with it too! #FluorescenceFriday www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Happy #FluorescenceFriday. The first time I imaged a 🐸 embryo, I didn't realise they had these ciliated cells on the outer surface. So you can imagine how surprised and curious I was! These cilia are similar to those found in the human airway. And yes, this is just a good old confocal + 🔥LUT!

#FluorescenceFriday: Given the recently grown interest in ciliary beating, here is a movie of beating cilia in a human airway model that I captured last week with lattice light-sheet microscopy. No AI „processing“, this is the raw data! Frame rate is ca. 170fps, displayed here at 25fps.

To add to all the lovely videos of non-AI processes multicilia beating: ctenophore multiciliated cells! They can reach up to 1mm long, causing a rainbow light refraction effect with the correct light positioning! Taken by myself at MBL in 2019 embryology. Realtime frame-rate!

The (another) weird thing about this is where the 'flow' comes from, they are beating quite randomly to start off with but then suddenly all bend to one side when the 'camera' sweeps across the field of view

The link states that the cilia were imaged with "diffractive super resolution microscopy" which is not a technique I have ever heard of... anyone?? Apparently based on this paper? (which at first glance does not seem as outrageous as the Nikon video) arxiv.org/abs/2512.13432

I am looking for a lab manager for my group that I will be starting at the @fmiscience.bsky.social in February! We will use in situ structural biology to investigate dynamic ciliary processes. More info here —> bsky.app/profile/comp... #cilia #teamtomo #proteomics #protistsky

Terence Tao says AI companies are harming mathematics by dropping new results without engaging with academia. “These companies are dumping carcasses of raw meat onto our table and saying ‘here you go, I solved your food problem’ and then they just leave." www.newscientist.com/article/2588...

A very persistent, tireless cowboy! Very pretty choanoflagellates, imaged today on LLS together with Babette van Amen from @agathechaigne.bsky.social lab.

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 Choanoflagellates reorganize their global cytoskeletal architecture within seconds to explore confined microspaces. This is the main PhD work of the amazing @maitefreired.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A tread 🧵⬇️

Our team is recruiting a PhD student to investigate the evolution of pressure sensation in Zooplankton! The project will use marine invertebrate larvae to explore the molecular, cellular, and neuronal mechanisms behind this fascinating sensory system. More details here: bit.ly/3TTeF4Q

Wow someone really made our Pterosperma flagellate into a QWOP game... one key per cilium. check it out! surprisingly difficult not to be eaten by copepods... poke.mino.mobi/qwop (presumably, that's why the real cell has a super fast 'reorientation' mode)

I really like this work, from imaging to analysis. Here is my 5 cents on why it is cool. In short, to acquire a shape of a beating cilium without a smear, you need to record at ~1000 fps, i.e. have time resolution of ~ 1 ms. This is a current limit of modern "high-end" scientific cameras. (1/N)

Checkout 𝘚𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘢 𝘭𝘶𝘬𝘰𝘭𝘪, a new species of amoeba isolated from cow poop that aggregates on the tips of dung fibers doi.org/10.64898/202... #ProtistsOnSky

Laser scan versus spinning disc

Cilia alert! Last year Juyeon Hong described a new domain in 9+2 cilia called the EDT, the extreme distal tip. Now, she's found a new protein required for its assembly, but only in non-mammalian vertebrates. A cool evo-cell / protein evolution story in @cellreports.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2xvdskx6

Here are some nice mushrooms

Thrilled to announce that together with Klaus Lehnertz and Timo Bröhl, Universitätsklinikum Bonn , Wolfram Barfuss, The University of Bonn and Mehrnaz Anvari, Fraunhofer SCAI we are organizing the XLVII Dynamic Days Europe 2027 in Bonn! #DynamicDaysEurope @mpinb.mpg.de

Cool new behavior caught on video! This is a special type of octopus known as a #papernautilus (aka #argonaut) and her shell is a little less than 5cm. Watch as she extends and retracts her fleshy mantle - at the end, she rapidly retracts it all! #blackwater #blackwaterdiving

While the Fields Medal celebrates the under-40s, the mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups, a topic she has worked on for more than 60 years.

Our review paper on nerve nets has just been published!! @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy