WashU has a Green Labs program that aims to encourage labs across all WashU campuses to be champions of sustainability.
Our lab manager Faith Stemmler worked as our Green Labs liaison, and as of January 2025, with a score of 90%, the Özpolat lab has achieved PLATINUM certification.
We have a new publication in Nature Communications, a companion paper to our Pristina leidyi work published earlier this year! This was a part of Duygu’s postdoctoral work when she was back in Guillaume Balavoine’s lab in Paris. It is a great collaborative effort by several labs (Raible, Balavonie, Ruta) that culminated in a fantastic paper addressing some of the big questions in annelid regeneration. More here:
https://source.washu.edu/2024/11/understanding-the-mechanics-of-regeneration/
Skeet by the Raible Lab here: https://bsky.app/profile/tessmarraiblelabs.bsky.social/post/3lb7oy7fsnc2g
Tweet by the Balavoine Lab here: https://twitter.com/BalavoineLab/status/1858472829970256001
Article by Maddy Frank.
Inside a corner lab in the basement of Busch, thousands of worms lay in wait.
The windowless room stays at a cool 18 degrees Celsius. Small plastic containers (think the ones you might have put some craft supplies in as a kid) line the front wall, each a contained saltwater habitat where juvenile worms hide in tubes of their own creation.
It feels almost Marvel movie-esque—a multitude of worlds stacked on top of one another, where only a chosen few can see the full picture.
Duygu is giving a keynote talk at the Aquatic Models for Human Disease conference in San Antonio, TX.
Duygu and Ranny will present posters at the Germ Cells meeting in Cold Spring Harbor, NY.
Duygu and Ranny will give invited talks at the Stowers Developmental Cell Biology meeting.
Dr. Ranny Passos Ribeiro’s first manuscript of her work in the lab has been posted as a preprint. You can read more about it in this tweetorial.
We have a new publication in Developmental Biology!
This is the hard work of Bria Metzger , who was a post-bac research assistant in our lab, now a graduate student at University of Washington in Seattle.
Here is a Twitter thread about this work.
And we will be on Developmental Biology’s cover with this photo taken by Ryan Null!
Exciting times, Duygu is one of the organizers of the Platynereis Satellite Meeting.
Ranny, Duygu, Ryan are giving talks at the satellite meeting.
Ranny is giving a talk at the Evo Devo main meeting. Duygu and Ryan have posters.
Come say hi if you’ll be there!
We send the undergrad Lisa Cheung who graduated this year off to her new adventures.
And we welcome 4 new undergrads: Adebimbola Adedeji, Alina Krawczynski, Ina Jaegy, and Solana Cariello. Welcome to the team!
Almost a year later since my post about the preprint, this paper is now published! Again, a tweetorial from Jordi is here. AND a great press release written by Talia Ogliore is here.
Undergrad researcher Jasmine Sun got the BioSURF summer research fellowship for 2024, which is a wonderful opportunity for undergrads at WashU!
Congratulations Jasmine. We are so excited to see what you will find with you Pristina experiments.
We have two undergraduate students joining us for research! Lisa is a senior, and Jasmine is a junior. Welcome both!
Research assistant Bria Metzger has been accepted to the Molecular & Cellular Biology Program at University of Washington (Seattle) with a prestigious ARCS fellowship. https://www.arcsfoundation.org
We are so sad to see her leave but so excited for her new adventure. Bria, we know you’ll be amazing wherever you go!
Julianna joined the lab as our first graduate student! We are so happy to have you back and so glad you picked our lab to continue your graduate school journey!
Blake was recently featured in the WashU postdoc society’s rapid fire section. Check out the great interview with him, and find out about the ENABLE outreach project he leads.
We have a new pre-print out, which is the result of a wonderful collaboration with Jordi Solana’s lab.
It is the first adult single cell atlas of an annelid, one of our favorite annelids, Pristina leidyi Smith, 1896 bioRxiv
Here is Jordi’s tweetorial about the preprint, and here are some details from me.
This was basically one of those collaborations where we were better than sum of our parts, and we loved working on this together! Jordi writes about it here, and I am forever grateful I got to work with him and his team on this project.
Duygu will give a talk at UW-Madison Wisconsin next week (May 5th)
She will then be at the Gordon Conference on Tissue Repair and Regeneration as an invited speaker in late May/early June.
Duygu and Ranny will teach at the Embryology Course at the MBL in Woods Hole this summer. Then Duygu, Ryan, and Ranny will be at the SDB Meeting in Chicago.
A while ago, after Twitter was acquired by a somebody with severely low emotional intelligence, and that somebody started attacking trans people, scientists, disabled folks etc, I decided to leave Twitter. Even though initially I wasn’t sure about leaving, it became an obvious choice, especially folks switching to Mastodon. This has been a very interesting experience that had some unexpected outcomes for me. In this blog post, I want to briefly talk about those outcomes, and then explain what I plan to do next about my social media presence.
1) In making the switch to Mastodon, I started spending a lot less time on social media.
Because there was not as much activity on Mastodon. This helped me realize that I was spending way more time on social media than I liked. It was difficult at first, but because I had left Twitter out of a principle that was so important to me, I could not flake and just get back on it. This helped a lot in limiting my social media use.
2) I used to tell myself I learn a lot via Twitter.
And that is not incorrect, but the type of learning that happens wasn’t as meaningful as I wanted it to be, especially for the time spent. For example, I learn more meaningful things by reading a journal article in 1 hour, compared to the 1 hour spent on Twitter. One could argue you learn many more smaller things, but really, do they ever stick as real knowledge? Maybe a small portion. Since leaving Twitter I have been reading so much more, and feel happier.
3) But it is not all black and white, there are good things about social media.
I don’t mean this to be a blog post about how bad social media is. It isn’t. I love #WormWednesday, I love reading other academics thoughts in a less formal space, I love the power of social media in raising awareness. So, I realized I do not want to be completely off social media, but I really want to limit the time spent (like really, 10 minutes/day for Twitter, 10 minutes for Mastodon, 10 minutes for Instagram).
4) Oh so, does this mean I am back on Twitter, after all that I have said, despite how much I despise the owner?
The revolution I hoped (a mass move out of Twitter to a de-centralized platform) unfortunately did not happen. In the meantime, multiple earthquakes devastated Türkiye. So much of the earthquake aid and communication was happening via Twitter inevitably. I realized it is not possible to isolate myself, and the reality is, the social media revolution hasn’t happened. Initially, I decided to be back on Twitter only for earthquake relief efforts. But the experience also made me accept the fact that I need the platform for spreading the word about my lab’s work.
5) So what’s next?
Basically, I will be on Twitter only for announcing my lab’s works, job posts, other professional announcements etc. Stuff that can be done via 10 minutes/day. If something like a disaster requires more time spent, then I will spend more time. I have already been feeling the good effects of the limited time on social media on my mental health. So, in some ways, I am grateful for the toddler man who forced me to explore this new way of existence on social media. <3
Here is where you can find me (but find me IRL and let’s have coffee or something):
Mastodon (the ideal, decentralized social media platform, despite room for improvement for its user interface)
Twitter (out of obligation because y’all haven’t left)
Instagram (for science-art, also I know Facebook is evil too)
Grace is visiting from Stephan Schneider’s Lab in Taiwan to learn how to inject Platynereis embryos.
Welcome to Kaitlyn, our new undergraduate researcher at the lab! Kaitlyn will be working with Ranny on establishing sex-specific markers in Platynereis dumerilii.
We will be at SICB in Austin,TX!
Ranny, Bria, Duygu, and Ryan are presenting.
Ranny’s talk: Comparative transcriptomics reveals sex-specific differences in Platynereis dumerilii
Bria’s talk: The cost or payout of regeneration on growth and sexual maturation in Platynereis dumerilii
Duygu’s talk: Single-cell transcriptomics reveal specific gut regions in a freshwater annelid
Ryan’s poster: Automating design of fluorescent in situ probes for big data sets