Irene Manton was a pioneer of electron microscopy.
She produced the first diagrammatic reconstruction of the 9+2 microtubular structure of the #cilium in 1952. When she showed her beautiful micrographs at international meetings, the audience would cheer and break into applause.
And she mortgaged her house to buy an electron microscope!
https://www.embrc.eu/newsroom/news/irene-manton-algal-cell-biologist-and-her-electron-microscope
Nice piece on a large zooplankton survey by Leonid Moroz in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/05/ocean-genome-atlas-project-scientists-plankton-dna-secrets-human-biology-sailing-boats @biology #plankton
@Sedathems it's about a polyclad flatworm, related to this beauty
https://www.reeflex.net/tiere/12181_Prostheceraeus_floridanus.htm
Such a perfect ending for a paper!
"The animals themselves did not long survive in the aquarium. A slow process of dissolution set in at some point on the body, and gradually more and more of the tissue melted away till only the tentacle- and brain-region remained. This crept about for a few days, but finally it, too, disintegrated. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, May 12, 1893."
Wheeler, W. M. (1894). Journal of Morphology, 9(2), 195–201. doi:10.1002/jmor.1050090203
New paper from Ikeda et al. on the biogenesis of chitin bristles in the annelid #Platynereis with nice #vEM reconstructions and a chitin synthase knockout. Bristles are formed in a process of biological 3D printing. @biology \#microscopy https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48044-3
Still time to sign up to our COS Symposium 2024
"Life in Context: Organismal sensing and adaptation in the natural environment"
in Heidelberg July 22-23, 2024.
Free registration.
with @vincentflora, @NicoleDubilier, @GonzalezLab and many other great speakers
Beautiful new study by Michael Bok, Macali & Garm on the high-resolution eyes of the enigmatic alciopid annelids, from Ponza island. "Our results show that the eyes of alciopids possess the anatomical, morphological, and physiological properties requisite for high resolution tasks and object vision" https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.02.055 \#annelid #Evolution #eye @biology @mikebok
@Sal Thank you! Indeed, the opsin is not the sensor, but we can use a mutation in the opsin gene to disrupt the ciliary superstructure and then we see a phenotype in pressure sensing, and also in UV light sensing, as we previously described: https://elifesciences.org/articles/36440
@dpunked Thank you! A bryozoan larva would be nice! Maybe one day we will get there...
We have now published a new and massively extended/reworked preprint of the whole-body #Platynereis larval #connectome with over 50 figures
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.17.585258v1
All the analyses, plots and figures should be reproducible in #rstats with the code provided:
https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10825370
by querying our public #CATMAID database:
Press release at @eLife of our paper exploring the mechanism of pressure sensing by UV light sensors in #Platynereis larvae
Luis Alberto Bezares Calderón et al. paper here: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/94306
Interesting review by Maria Sachkova on the #ctenophore nervous system and the challenges of studying it. https://doi.org/10.1111/ede.12472 \#neuroscience @biology
Gaspar Jekely @biologists.social Professor at the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS), University of Heidelberg, Germany and at the Living Systems Institute (LSI), University of Exeter, UK. #neuroscience of marine larvae, #connectomics, #cilia, ciliary swimming, cell and nervous system #evolution, #GPCR, #neuropeptides, #Platynereis, #Trichoplax, #Nematostella, #Schistosoma, #coral #neuroscience #rstat #evolution #fedi22