Thanks for the great visit! You can find more about our work here:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

Had a fantastic day yesterday at the Collaboratorium. Thanks to Jordi @jgojalvo.bsky.social @dsb-lab.bsky.social for hosting me, to Bastien for organizing, and to Vikas @viktri08.bsky.social, Bastian, Eric @elatorre.bsky.social, Oriol and all for the stimulating discussions!

#BCNCollaboratorium

Oops, that first picture looks completely different than on my computer. Here it is again, this time without the background, hopefully better.

Experiments in Xenopus extracts confirmed that both mechanisms act in parallel: interphase and mitosis scale differently with temperature, and cyclin synthesis is especially sensitive. Together they explain the Arrhenius-like scaling at intermediate T and its breakdown at extremes, across species.

The puzzle isn’t just why cycles look Arrhenius, but why and how they deviate.

Our modeling shows that mismatched temperature sensitivities of regulatory enzymes and biphasic cyclin synthesis act in parallel, creating systematic departures from simple scaling.

🧵Why do early embryonic cell cycles speed up with temperature almost like simple chemical reactions, but not quite? 🌡️

Across frogs, fish, worms, and flies we found a shared scaling law, and uncovered why deviations from Arrhenius behavior emerge.

👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62918-0

This scaling echoes what embryos do naturally: at the midblastula transition (MBT), cycles slow as the N/C ratio rises and transcription begins. We find that cytoplasm–nucleus coupling can already slow the clock before genome activation, a complementary layer of timing control.

Our model backs this up: instead of a single cytoplasmic cell cycle oscillator, the system becomes two coupled oscillators — nucleus and cytoplasm — dynamically linked through import/export. This nuclear–cytoplasmic coupling slows the cycle as the nucleus grows.

🧵Does the nucleus set the cell cycle clock? 🕒

In frog egg extract “mini-cells” we see that as nuclei grow, cycles slow down. The period scales with the nuclear-to-cytoplasmic ratio, across Xenopus species, and even when DNA replication or transcription are blocked.

👉 doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

BOOM💥Martina was on fire at the recent #Biologists100 meeting on Liverpool, sharing her research on cell cycle oscillations. #proudPI

Had a great time this week with a wonderful group of researchers at our workshop on the physics of early embryonic cell divisions! Big thanks to everyone there, i.e. Johanna, Frank, Laura and Adam from @biologists.bsky.social, and to my co-organizer @kamenzlab.bsky.social! Let’s do this again!