2D, but never flat — neural progenitors glowing blue & yellow, and me falling for biology all over again 😍

I’m not even from the Crick, nor from England but I completely agree with the contents of the abstract !

I still remember try to make some of these tricks on Tony hawk when it came out on PC 🫠

🌟 Absolutely mesmerizing! The vibrant interplay of Sox2 in sky blue with proliferating neural stem cells creates a brilliant window into brain development. A perfect showcase of science meeting art—thanks for sharing this beauty! 🧠💡

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

Thank You! 🤗

Thank You! 😍

I want to thank everyone involved in this work on top of Ryszard who did an amazing job. Laure Coquand, Amandine Di Cicco, Christophe Chehade, @clarissebrunet.bsky.social @pauline-lestienne.bsky.social, Julia Ladewig, Karin Forsberg-Nilsson, Fabien Guimiot and our fantastic imaging facility!

Using 9 different glioblastoma lines we show that IST and MST both occur, although not in all cells, reflecting the heterogeneity of these tumors. Strikingly, glioblastoma undergoing IST and MST did so using the same molecular mechanism as the ones identified here in bRG cells.

Finally, because past work form @bhadurilab.bsky.social and others had shown a facilitating similarity between bRG cells and glioblastoma cells (including the presence of MST), we tested the conservation of our mechanisms in these cells.

Therefore, microtubule related genes are more likely to affect human oSVZ expansion than actin-related ones.

So MST and IST are totally different mechanisms, but what is their relative contribution to bRG dissemination in the human fetal cortex? After extensive recording in fetal explants, Ryszard could show that IST contributes to 85% of the total basal movement, while MST contributes to 15%.

Mechanistically, we demonstrate that MST is dependent on the mitotic cell rounding pathway, that enables most adherent cells to round up for proper chromosome segregation through an increase of the cell cortex stiffness. Knocking down ERM proteins (Ezrin-Radixin-Moesin) or Vimentin all alter MST.

We next focused our attention on MST and, using Sir-tubulin dyes, first showed that it occurred after nuclear envelope breakdown, and is therefore a mitotic spindle translocation event!!! I find this crazy, and to our knowledge quite unique in biology (so far...).