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.

I started these experiments in Jim Ferrell’s lab at Stanford over 10 years ago, so it’s special to see this finally out. Huge thanks to @janrombouts.bsky.social and Franco Tavella (from Qiong Yang’s lab, also a Ferrell alum) for pulling this project over the line!

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.

Deep thanks to all co-authors and collaborators. Special shoutout to Liliana Piñeros (now a postdoc in the lab of co-author Rebecca Heald at UC Berkeley, doing fantastic new work!) and to @nikitaphysics.bsky.social in our group: you both really pulled this story together!

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.

Fantastic, very cool!!

3️⃣"Physics of the Early Embryonic Divisions Workshop – Microtubules, energy and cell fate decisions in early embryogenesis" by @olgaafonso.bsky.social, @shuzokato.bsky.social & Helena Cantwell

thenode.biologists.com/physics-of-t...

Thank you to everyone who wrote these reports!

(3/3🧵)

2️⃣ "Physics of the Early Embryonic Cell Divisions: Feedbacks, Flows and Information" by Claudio Hernández-López and @singh29aditya.bsky.social

thenode.biologists.com/physics-of-t...

(2/3🧵)