We wish a very warm welcome to Santiago Ortiz, who recently joined us as a BIST master student. Santiago performed his undergrad in Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, studying physics and biology. He will work closely with Frede to probe more nuclear mechanics, continuing the colaboration with Ruprecht and Wieser labs. Welcome, Santi and happy tweezing.

The lab in nodes and edges;

Click on a project (purple node) and find out who is working with whom.

After a long and exhausting hiatus from the perennial and activity-modulated Corona-virus plague, we have the pleasure to welcome Shadi Karimi to the lab. Shadi will give a new twist to active microfluidics and we wish her a fantastic start!

Our collaboration with Martin Harterink from University of Utrecht and Stefan Wieser @ICFO was just published in eLife. With a combination of biochemistry, cell biology and superresolution microscopy, we uncovered a ternary complex that is involved in anchoring the cortical spectrin cytoskeleton to the microtubules. Not suprisingly, this ternary complex contain ankyrin/unc-44 and a MT-binding protein CRMP/unc-33, which are bridged together with the worm-worlds most favorite protein, unc-119.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/55111

Preprint online with Ruprecht (CRG), Wieser and Loza labs (ICFO) lab on nuclear control of morphodynamics during early zebrafish development. Using an optical trapping assay combined with spinning disk confical microscopy we were able to measure the mechanics of the nucleus in relation to single cell mechanosensation.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/865949v1

If you ever wondered where the unc-119 phenotype comes from in your Mossci worms, the results of a wonderful collaboration with the Harterink (Utrecht) and Wieser (ICFO) labs are now posted on the bioRxiv. UNC-119 might be the missing link between the spectrin and microtubule cytoskeleton, at forms a ternary complex with unc-44/ankyrin and unc-33/crmps – surprisingly, it shares similar organization as the 190nm periodicity of the actin/spectrin cytoskeleton. Check it out!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/783837v1

We have the pleasure to host Rachele Catalano as a Maria Yzuel Fellow, a freshly baked awardee for the support of women in science. We are excited to work with Rachele in a joint project with Pablo Loza’s group aimed towards the implementation of novel light field methods to detect fast calcium transient in moving animals. Good luck, Rachele, and enjoy your time in NMSB+SLN.

A few weeks ago NMSBLab turned two and we gathered to celebrate this birthday and other things with special guest Miriam Goodman. We all enjoyed a dense day of good discussions around the worm and mechanical stresses on the good and not so good side.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We have the pleasure to welcome two new amazing people to the team – Nawaphat a.k.a. New and Adriana. New joins us from his home country Thailand where he was working with worms before during his awesome master thesis (or were these sea urchins?) and Adriana comes directly from Hamburg/Venezuela after defending her PhD!!! Congrats and welcome aboard.

It is this time of the year again!!! Last Friday was the annual ICFO day with lots of science and fun. Montse, Ravi and Sara made an impressive worm show, showcasing some jumping worms. A big applause goes out to Sara, who won one of the poster-awards-Congrats Sara, well done!