Developmental neurobiology and brain evolution beyond vertebrates
Suckered into cephalopod and killifish biology
Full Professor of Biology at KU Leuven, Belgium
Eve Seuntjens
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What happens if you stitch two halfs of different flatworm species together? This Frankenstein experiment led to the amazing discovery of an atom bomb cell. Both the story and the people leading the work are fantastic. Must-read!
Bo Wang (Associate Professor by courtesy, of Developmental Biology) and Christine Jacobs-Wagner (a Dev Bio alumni) have shown that planaria have “ruptoblasts”, cells that can kill invading bacteria by blowing themselves up, taking the bacteria out with them! 🧨💥
news.stanford.edu/stories/2026...
Finally, the mainstream media has been forced to acknowledge the unbalanced microcentrifuge incident from Project Hail Mary, a scandal that shook the world of molecular biology when the movie was first released weeks ago.
Do you know an outstanding aquarist?
We're hiring a Senior Aquarist to help run our cephalopod facility at Columbia University. Our team maintains a colony of 250+ cuttlefish, develops new husbandry techniques (inc transgenics) & studies cuttlefish camouflage and social behavior. 1/3
[Pls repost!]
🚨 We discovered a new mode of Hox gene regulation in annelids! 🪱 A distal enhancer acts as a "global control region", lifting Hox genes from Polycomb repression. This is reminiscent of Hox gene control in vertebrates, but the two modes likely evolved convergently.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Cool new work out from the @matosches.bsky.social lab! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The new OrthoFinder paper is out now!
In this new work, we introduce major advances in accuracy and scalability, allowing analysis on much larger datasets
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
github.com/OrthoFinder/...
1/11
When we think about learning, we think about brains.
Neurons. Animals.
But what if learning began much earlier?
Our paper in PRXLife, led by @maorknak.bsky.social explores whether a unicell relative of animals can use environmental cues to anticipate future stress. 🧵
Link: go.aps.org/4vAU56R
Video
Perfectly fitting preprint to today’s #RSCDB Spring Meeting’s theme on cortical development. Beautiful story on amphibian cortical development logic. Congrats to @astridd93.bsky.social and the @matosches.bsky.social team! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Eve Seuntjens
Convergent evolution of cluster-wide Hox gene regulation in Bilateria https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.18.725834v1
Video
Project Hail Mary, Jurassic Park: from dino-mosquitoes to a spaceship’s roar, pointless mistakes on the scientific details make me wince, says science writer Helen Pilcher
