That was a midwest-level of green sky! What a storm

Wow that's an interesting one! At least if you had to lose some organoids, these made for a good discussion! Alternatively, chia pet organoids.

I’ve had fungal contamination before but usually it either disintegrates the organoids or exists as its own colorful free floating entity. But based off the images that’s my best guess too for Tiffany’s plates, probably just a different flavor of fuzzy

Are the organoids still in suspension or have they adhered? Sometimes they get sticky (and some brands of plates have this happen more often) and if they do, splat out like that. Seems unlikely for a whole plate to do that unintentionally though

I'm so sorry, Kristen.

* And postdocs!

Thanks Shubham!

Thank you!

And @bobbyjeyeguy.bsky.social for mentorship and support throughout the *6 years* I have been working on this! 7/n

Massive thanks to all of the authors, including Clayton Santiago and @sethblackshaw.bsky.social for the multiomics analysis, Kiara Eldred, Ian Glass, and Tom Reh for fetal tissue, Arturo Hernandez for the functional assays, and Nate Lord for the computational modeling 6/n

Lastly, we modeled this system to try to understand why the retina uses such a complicated system for PR development, and show that doing so provides accurate temporality, subtype fate, and robustness in specification despite underlying variability in RPCs 5/n

We use this DIO3 mutant to show that the developing retina experiences local negative autoregulatory feedback similar to what exists on an organismal level to maintain homeostatic levels of TH. Additionally, we used chimeric organoids to show a role for cell non-autonomous feedback in TH reg. 4/n

Turns out, disrupting TH signaling genetically (DIO3 mutant) or pharmacologically (exogenous TH) advances photoreceptor subtype specification and promotes red/green cone fate, even inducing other photoreceptor subtypes to express red/green opsin. 3/n

DIO3 degrades thyroid hormone (TH), and we predicted it would have a role in limiting TH signaling which promotes terminal red/green cone fate. We show that it is expressed in retinal progenitor cells (RPCs) and we hypothesize that the ratio of DIO3+ RPCs:DIO3-neurons drives specification events 2/n