Sea cucumbers are beautiful! 🥒

This image shows the skeleton of a baby sea cucumber. Very happy that it got awarded by #NikonSmallWorld 😊

👇 Check the preprint by @PranavVyas and @prakashlab.bsky.social if you want to learn more about skeleton development in these animals:
shorturl.at/J3g1h

Sea urchin metamorphosis is maybe one of the most radical event in developmental biology. In just about an hour, these little pluteus larvae completely reorganize their entire body plan.

Very happy that this video got awarded an honorable mention by #NikonSmallWorld 😃

I am very happy to announce that the Echinox Lab will open in the BIOM unit at @obs-banyuls.fr in January 2026!! 🥳

We will use several echinoderm species to study animal body plan evolution.
🔽 Check our brand new lab website if you want to learn more about our future research
www.echinox.org

+ Bonus baby geese 🐣🐤

Birdwatching from my desk at Hopkins Marine Station (instead of working on my paper's revisions 🥹 🥲)
#DoomscrollingBreak

This confirms that echinoderms are mostly head-like animals from an ectoderm patterning perspective, and helps us reconstruct axial evolution across echinoderm body plans ⭐

More importantly, we looked at the expression of 21 AP patterning genes at different juvenile timepoints, and found that their expression is consistent with the model that we described previously in sea stars, albeit with modifications that we attribute to the derived brittle star morphology

Among other things, we've learned that working with brittle star samples can be terrifying at times 😱

If you like snowflakes, check our new preprint about axial patterning in brittle stars ⭐

We looked at the expression of anteroposterior patterning genes in Amphipholis squamata juveniles, and compared it with existing data from other classes

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@lowelab.bsky.social

Time to recycle this xmas brittle star HCR ⭐
Happy holidays all!! ❄️🎁🎄

Stay tuned for some more brittle star data coming soon 😎

#fluorescence #microscopy #HCR #holidays #imaging

Calcein staining showing the skeleton on the aboral side of a juvenile sea star (Patiria miniata)
Everything looks better with a rainbow LUT 🌈😊
#microscopy #echinoderms #fluorescence

Shamelessly taking advantage of the bluesky migration to share again some of my favorite echinoderm pics 😀🤩

🔽 Acetylated tubulin (nerves and cilia) and phalloidin (muscles) stains in a juvenile sea urchin (Paracentrotus lividus) just after metamorphosis ⭐

So happy to see this picture of the nervous system in a transparent Henricia sea star selected as an image of distinction by @NikonSmallWorld !! 😎

It was imaged using the see-star clearing protocol developped with @Nat Clarke
⬇️Check the paper here:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our study investigating the hidden molecular anatomy of sea stars is now published!! 🥳🥳🥳

We looked at a long standing zoological problem: how to compare the pentaradial symmetry of echinoderms with the bilateral symmetry of their relatives?

Check what we found here 🔽
www.nature.com/articles/s41...