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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

yes so happy for him!!! this is exactly why we do curiosity-driven science... #chlamydomonas #protistsonsky Funders and universities are you watching...???

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Dale Moulding @dalemoulding.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Having seen the news: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... thought I'd share a cilia movie captured at UCL GOS ICH with Eriomina Shahaj & Vanesa Papastavrou using simple DIC on a Nikon Ti2 with DIC at 60x1.4. 500 fps here slowed down 20 times. Processed with Nikon's denoiseAI and an unsharp mask in Fiji.

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We can't even do this for most protists!! 😅

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Archaea Biology Vienna @archaea-vienna.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Our paper on the dynamics of Asgard archaea (Promethearchaeota) is now out in Nature! Huge thanks to the reviewers for helping make the manuscript stronger. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Two “Lokis” stained for Lokiactin (FastAct, magenta), reaching toward each other to celebrate 🎉 #archaea

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

you're right! I found some more info about this sample, it was more likely #Stylonychia mytilus, here's a picture of a whole cell, sadly being fed with chlamy (?) as food... (no scalebar sorry!) #ciliates #protistsonsky

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Move over C. elegans... single celled protist wriggles forwards and backwards! Check out the beautiful ciliary metachronal waves #didinium #protistsonsky

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Sure! It's from an environmental sample likely a euplotes I think, has lots of cirri and membranelle cilia...

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

ooh Bluesky can do videos now... here's an emergency #cilia movie

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Cells & Development @cellsdev.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

We heard through the vines that #cilia are hot (or not?) right now so here is a cool article by the Saxena lab about how Notch signalling inhibit zebrafish olfactory multiciliated cells differentiation 🐟 AND we got a cool movie with it too! #FluorescenceFriday www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Anh Hoang Le, PhD 🏳️‍🌈🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇻🇳 @anhhle2702.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Happy #FluorescenceFriday. The first time I imaged a 🐸 embryo, I didn't realise they had these ciliated cells on the outer surface. So you can imagine how surprised and curious I was! These cilia are similar to those found in the human airway. And yes, this is just a good old confocal + 🔥LUT!

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Valentin Dunsing-Eichenauer @dunsingvalentin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

#FluorescenceFriday: Given the recently grown interest in ciliary beating, here is a movie of beating cilia in a human airway model that I captured last week with lattice light-sheet microscopy. No AI „processing“, this is the raw data! Frame rate is ca. 170fps, displayed here at 25fps.

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Mia Konjikusic, PhD @konjikusicmia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

To add to all the lovely videos of non-AI processes multicilia beating: ctenophore multiciliated cells! They can reach up to 1mm long, causing a rainbow light refraction effect with the correct light positioning! Taken by myself at MBL in 2019 embryology. Realtime frame-rate!

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

you're right - active stage movement could be enough to create a global flow in the chamber that would induce this kind of collective bending motion (separate from the usual low-Re issue). This must be a heavily AI-edited video of a single multiciliated cell with significant stage movement too!

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The (another) weird thing about this is where the 'flow' comes from, they are beating quite randomly to start off with but then suddenly all bend to one side when the 'camera' sweeps across the field of view

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The link states that the cilia were imaged with "diffractive super resolution microscopy" which is not a technique I have ever heard of... anyone?? Apparently based on this paper? (which at first glance does not seem as outrageous as the Nikon video) arxiv.org/abs/2512.13432

arxiv.org

Spatiotemporally decoupled super-oscillatory microscopy enables label-free reconstruction of human ciliary waveforms

Imaging native motile cilia requires label-free contrast, sub-diffraction spatial discrimination, and millisecond temporal sampling. We introduce Super-Oscillatory Label-free Inertia-free Scanning (SO...

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Caitie McCafferty @computingcaitie.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I am looking for a lab manager for my group that I will be starting at the @fmiscience.bsky.social in February! We will use in situ structural biology to investigate dynamic ciliary processes. More info here —> bsky.app/profile/comp... #cilia #teamtomo #proteomics #protistsky

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Matthew Sparkes @sparkes.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Terence Tao says AI companies are harming mathematics by dropping new results without engaging with academia. “These companies are dumping carcasses of raw meat onto our table and saying ‘here you go, I solved your food problem’ and then they just leave." www.newscientist.com/article/2588...

newscientist.com

Terence Tao: AI companies are harming mathematics | New Scientist

AI companies are making new mathematical discoveries at a rapid pace but not sticking around to help unpick the new proofs. That is not the way to advance our understanding, says mathematician Terence...

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Eugene Katrukha 🇺🇦 @ekatrukha.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

A very persistent, tireless cowboy! Very pretty choanoflagellates, imaged today on LLS together with Babette van Amen from @agathechaigne.bsky.social lab.

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Luis Alberto Bezares Calderón @lbezarescalderon.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Our team is recruiting a PhD student to investigate the evolution of pressure sensation in Zooplankton! The project will use marine invertebrate larvae to explore the molecular, cellular, and neuronal mechanisms behind this fascinating sensory system. More details here: bit.ly/3TTeF4Q

bit.ly

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Wow someone really made our Pterosperma flagellate into a QWOP game... one key per cilium. check it out! surprisingly difficult not to be eaten by copepods... poke.mino.mobi/qwop (presumably, that's why the real cell has a super fast 'reorientation' mode)

poke.mino.mobi

QWOP — four cilia, four keys, one ocean

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

a very cool idea for a game! although normally pterosperma swims head first (basically like a sperm cell), if you're using Gray and Hancock coefficients could they be the wrong way round...?🤔

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

p.s. and yes it looks remarkably like a lorentz attractor....looking forward to mining the data some more, i hope we get to the bottom of this one day!

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

thanks for writing this super informative thread! we took much of the above into consideration when deciding on the best imaging method, in the end we 'followed the organism', which is unusual in how they are able to propagate nearly completely planar waves! the general challenge of 3D remains open!

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Eugene Katrukha 🇺🇦 @ekatrukha.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I really like this work, from imaging to analysis. Here is my 5 cents on why it is cool. In short, to acquire a shape of a beating cilium without a smear, you need to record at ~1000 fps, i.e. have time resolution of ~ 1 ms. This is a current limit of modern "high-end" scientific cameras. (1/N)

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

The ciliary beat patterns obey a fascinating mathematical relationship known as a "dispersion relation" — which links how fast the cilia beat (temporal freq) to the shape of the waves (spatial freq) they produce. (such a relationship exists for any undulatory swimmer, from C. elegans to snakes!)

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Pterosperma is a beautiful flagellate w/ 4 extremely long cilia. These cilia are so long that they can produce an entire spectrum of beating modes... To resolve the these beating patterns, we analysed >200,000 waveforms, and reconstructed the underlying manifold - strikingly low dimensional!

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

What does a single-celled organism tell us about the origins of complex behaviour? Delighted to see the final version of our paper: Embodied behavioural complexity in a ciliated microorganism out in@natcomms.nature.com (Funded by @erc.europa.eu ERC) doi.org/10.1038/s414... #cilia #protistsonsky

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Tristan @tristamoeba.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Checkout 𝘚𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘢 𝘭𝘶𝘬𝘰𝘭𝘪, a new species of amoeba isolated from cow poop that aggregates on the tips of dung fibers doi.org/10.64898/202... #ProtistsOnSky

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Cahir O'Kane @cahirokane.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Laser scan versus spinning disc

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

A primary cilium & all the centriolar satellites? 🤔 Had a great time at @faseborg.bsky.social #cilia meeting learning that as we have always suspected, cilia are always at the centre (and indeed at the periphery) of everything!

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John Wallingford @jbwallingford.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Cilia alert! Last year Juyeon Hong described a new domain in 9+2 cilia called the EDT, the extreme distal tip. Now, she's found a new protein required for its assembly, but only in non-mammalian vertebrates. A cool evo-cell / protein evolution story in @cellreports.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2xvdskx6

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lukelukeluke @lukelukeluke.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Here are some nice mushrooms

A tuft of crown-tipped coral mushrooms grow from a crevice on a decayed log in a forest bathed in late summer sunshine. All photos by me

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koseskalab.bsky.social @koseskalab.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Thrilled to announce that together with Klaus Lehnertz and Timo Bröhl, Universitätsklinikum Bonn , Wolfram Barfuss, The University of Bonn and Mehrnaz Anvari, Fraunhofer SCAI we are organizing the XLVII Dynamic Days Europe 2027 in Bonn! #DynamicDaysEurope @mpinb.mpg.de

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Chris Gug @gugunderwater.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Cool new behavior caught on video! This is a special type of octopus known as a #papernautilus (aka #argonaut) and her shell is a little less than 5cm. Watch as she extends and retracts her fleshy mantle - at the end, she rapidly retracts it all! #blackwater #blackwaterdiving

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Greg Egan @gregegansf.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

While the Fields Medal celebrates the under-40s, the mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups, a topic she has worked on for more than 60 years.

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Kei Jokura @kei-jokura.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Our review paper on nerve nets has just been published!! @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy

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EuroCilia2027 @eurocilia.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

📣 Abstract submission and early registration are now OPEN for the 7th European Cilia Conference—an official EMBO workshop! 📅 8–12 March 2027 📍 Stresa, Italy Submit and register: meetings.embo.org/event/27-cilia www.eurocilia.eu #EMBOCilia #Cilia2027

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Hi Kenneth, thanks a lot for your kind words!! :) we get a lot of daily inspiration all the crazy cells! (Hats off to Hannah who went on many sampling trips and isolated single tintinnids one by one by hand 😬...)

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Scott Coyle @cellraiser.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Had a blast putting this video abstract together with colleagues for @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social story in @currentbiology.bsky.social on how the "vampire cell" P. collini builds the perfect feeding trap 👀. Be sure to check out the full paper: www.cell.com/current-biol... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikzm...

youtube.com

A cellular vampire builds the perfect feeding trap / Curr. Biol., June 24, 2026 (Vol. 36, Issue 14)

YouTube video by Cell Press

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

We propose the following response hierarchy in tintinnid mechanosensitivity. Proving that once again, you don't need neurons to accomplish complex tasks like stimulus-dependent response selection...

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

In this ciliate, stronger vibrational cues cause whole-body contraction of the entire cell into its lorica! (which we associate with an energetically more costly defence response)

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

localised touch stimulation of the ciliary band trigger coordinated ciliary reversals and stereotyped transitions in waveform + frequency. Repeated simulation produces classical hallmarks of #habituation (a form of learning), incl. asymptotic response decline, recovery, and frequency dependence!

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Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Do #tintinnids dream of electric sheep? 🤯 Here is a single cell capable of building a lorica and living inside it for protection... it also swims, feeds, hunts Can even detect and habituate to mechanical cues! #celllearning #protistsonsky #cilia Read more in our preprint doi.org/10.64898/202...

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EMBL Events @events.embl.org · 15/06/2026

Last Friday, we wrapped up #EESMechanobiology 🧪 Thank you to our participants, speakers, and organisers for making this symposium a success. Together, we explored how new technologies and approaches are advancing mechanobiology across biological systems. We're looking forward to the next edition!

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Mu He @mh-lab.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Thanks @jcellsci.bsky.social and @katiepickup.bsky.social for the opportunity! It was fun to reflect on the years I spent in different labs and institutes.

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