Wow 😍 This is so impressive!

🥹

Of course team work makes the dream work and none of this would have been possible without Albert, Lukas, and two of my incredible Masters students, Noor and Bronte! 💜

But wait - did you spot the instances of stable microtubule orientation reversal in this cell?

We could even follow the fates of individual stable microtubules in these young neurons over the course of hours using StableMARK 😍

Remarkably, we found that stable microtubules are initially anchored at the centrioles and oriented plus-end-out in early neurites. They are then released from the centrioles, allowing them to reverse their polarity by sliding to adopt the minus-end-out orientation seen in mature dendrites.

And expansion microscopy let us precisely map the networks of acetylated (orange) and tyrosinated (blue) microtubules in these early neurites and near the centrioles!

Check it out for some beautiful super-resolution reconstructions of the microtubule networks in developing neurons! Using motor-PAINT, we can colour-code microtubules by their orientation to see how this changes during development. Cyan: plus-end-out (away from soma). Magenta: plus-end-in.