Giulia Paci
Physicist having a go at biology, EMBO postdoctoral fellow @UCL in the Mao group, @EMBL alumna
- We are delighted to announce that @giuliapaci.bsky.social from @ucllifesciences.bsky.social has been awarded the 2026 BSCB Postdoctoral researcher medal You can read about Giulia's work on how tissues withstand mechanical stress here: bscb.org/postdoctoral...
- I’m very proud of you Giulia!!
- Thanks Buzz!
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- Thank you Yanlan for your incredible support ❤️!
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- Thanks Ethan !
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- Thanks so much @rashmi-priya.bsky.social and congratulations to you!
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- Thanks Max!
- Very excited to receive this award and truly grateful to the @bscb-official.bsky.social who have been supporting me throughout my postdoc since I moved to the UK!
- We are delighted to announce that @giuliapaci.bsky.social from @ucllifesciences.bsky.social has been awarded the 2026 BSCB Postdoctoral researcher medal You can read about Giulia's work on how tissues withstand mechanical stress here: bscb.org/postdoctoral...
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- Thanks Helen and Gautam ☺️!!
- Thrilled to share my main postdoc work with @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social We used genomic barcoding + scRNAseq in chick & human embryos to reveal a lineage architecture that reshapes how we understand neural tube development & cell fate decisions 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Congratulations!! 🎉
- Very excited about this project: we believe that 3D anatomical atlases have a huge potential for developmental biology. As a starting point, we made the first ever Drosophila wing disc atlas!
- BrainGlobe branches out! New blog outlining our collaborative work with @giuliapaci.bsky.social from @lmcb-ucl.bsky.social to build anatomical atlases for developmental mechanobiology. brainglobe.info/blog/drosoph...
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- No we don't have single cells segmented here: since the template is meant to be a representative "average" wing disc, it would be challenging / impossible to align different samples at single cell resolution. It's meant to resolve relatively large anatomical regions (e.g. pouch, interveins...)
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- Thank you!
- We plan to further expand the annotations using region-specific genetic markers (e.g. A/P compartments, intervein regions). The current resolution is 2 µm, already quite high compared with most brain atlases (10–100 µm), and can be further increased to capture finer anatomical details.
- Any 3D wing disc images from a comparable stage can be aligned to our atlas and automatically segmented into the annotated sub-regions. The atlas is built within the @brainglobe.info ecosystem, so we can leverage its open-source Python tools for registration, visualization and analysis.
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- Sure! The population-averaged template was generated from 16 individual 3D images of female larval wing discs (~110–120 h AEL) expressing a membrane marker (Ubi-EGFP-CAAX). As a proof of principle, we manually annotated the main anatomical regions (pouch, hinge, notum, and peripodial layer).
- We are incredibly proud to receieve this award, especially as it recognises the hard work of the entire BrainGlobe community. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to BrainGlobe over the years!
- Congratulations to the whole team!! 👏🏻
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- Happy birthday Agathe! 🥳
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- Congratulations Max!!
- These are great - and could support your attendance to the 2025 CBIAS napari workshop for example! www.crick.ac.uk/whats-on/cbi...
- Super excited that our latest work is out! We use optogenetics to dynamically control and study the formation of morphogen gradients. If you are interested in optogenetic tools and/or how cells shape and process extracellular signals, check out @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social's thread and the paper.
- Our latest: We developed a chemo-optogenetic system for precise spatiotemporal control of morphogen production. Using dual light + small molecule control of Sonic Hedgehog production, we recapitulated neural tube patterning in vitro & measured spread of Shh 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Congratulations Dirk! 🥳
- Very excited to organise this Workshop with @rocha-lab.bsky.social ! Thanks @biologists.bsky.social for selecting our proposal 😍
- Courtney @courtneyl7a7.bsky.social has written a lovely piece on this wonderful community initiative we’ve been running for 5 years at UCL - have a read! And follow @biig-ucl.bsky.social !
- 📢New post on FocalPlane - Connecting Researchers Through Bioimaging: Reflections from UCL’s BioImage Interest Group Courtney Lancaster @courtneyl7a7.bsky.social reflects on the success of the BioImage Interest Group at UCL, offering a template for other communities.
- Many thanks to the other people involved in this project, past and present: @virsicas.bsky.social @k-meech.bsky.social @zimengwu33.bsky.social @nikosirmpilatze.com @shuenlim.bsky.social @fpichaud.bsky.social Pablo Vicente Munuera, Jonas Hartmann, Tchern Lenn and my co-founder Alessandro Felder
- Thrilled to share the first story from my postdoc! 🎉 A wonderful experiment + simulations collaboration. In the Drosophila wing, we find that 3D cell shapes affect signalling range and fine-tune developmental patterning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread below ⬇️
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- Thank you!
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- Thanks Max!!
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- Thanks Osvaldo!
- In summary, we think that the role of 3D epithelial cell shapes in inter-cellular signalling needs to be reconsidered, especially as scutoids with apico-basal intercalations can be found across multiple tissues and organisms!
- Thanks again to all the co-authors @yanlanmao.bsky.social, @buzzbaum.bsky.social and especially Francisco and Karen who developed all the modelling! Thanks to all support staff @lmcb-ucl.bsky.social, to the amazing fly community and @embo.org for funding my fellowship!
- Finally, simulations predict that if cells are "straightened" in z this will affect SOP spacing as the signalling range shrinks.
- To test this, we genetically increased Myo II activity, which results in more columnar, "straighter" cells. We were very excited to see that, as predicted, in these discs the SOP pattern is tighter!
- The model indeed predicts that, as we consider more and more 3D layers, SOPs transitions between salt-and-pepper (distance of 1) and sparse patterning.
- Importantly, it also allows us to test the role of different signalling strength profiles (which reflect Notch concentration) along the apico-basal axis. An exponential decay provides the most consistent patterning results and also is also the best fit to the experimental Notch distribution.
- What is really striking is that in wing discs nearly 100% of the cells are scutoids and these apico-basal intercalations double the number of unique cell contacts compared to apical contacts alone!
- To test how apical and lateral contacts shape Notch–Delta signalling, we built a Multi-layer Signalling Model. This framework simulates signalling on realistic 3D cell networks derived from imaging data.
- We wondered: could a cell’s 3D shape affect its signalling range? Wing disc cells are scutoids, and therefore could meet new neighbours through apico-basal intercalations.
- We developed a new imaging and segmentation pipeline to extract individual 3D cell shapes in this dense tissue and found that cells constantly swap neighbours along the apico-basal axis.
- We looked at sensory organ precursors (SOPs) along the wing margin, which are specified at the end of larval development through Notch-Delta signalling and will go on to form sensory bristles lining the fly wing.
- We found that their pattern is sparse (spacing between SOPs > 1), and simulations predict that long-range signalling — about 1.5–2 cell diameters — is necessary to match what we see in experiments.
- My Pathway to Independence interview is now live on @dev-journal.bsky.social ! I had a great time speaking with @amjeve.bsky.social about my research journey and what's ahead journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...
- Extremely honored to receive this prize from @socdevbio.bsky.social, which recognizes not only my love for developmental biology, but the extremely online I am 🧪 (protect science, protect people, viva la dev bio!)
- Congratulations !! 🎉
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- Congratulations Courtney !!
- Thanks a lot for hosting me @helenkmatthews.bsky.social, I had a great time !
- Today’s speaker in our DRN external seminar series (joint with MCB @mcb-sheffield.bsky.social) is Dr Giulia Paci @giuliapaci.bsky.social from UCL @ucl.ac.uk Giulia is a biophysicist interested in mechanics and developmental patterning. Host: Helen Matthews @helenkmatthews.bsky.social All welcome!
- It was a pleasure chatting with @jontytownson.bsky.social about our recent work in the @yanlanmao.bsky.social group on 3D segmentation in densely packed epithelia and discussing the benefits of preprints!
- Many cells during development are exposed to caspase activation and yet survive. Why some die and not others ? We found out that the memory of previous caspase activation bias significantly later death comitment and bias death distribution and single cell decision www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Beautiful work Romain!
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- Thanks Helen! ☺️
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- Thank you! ☺️
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- Thanks Dave!!
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- Thank you!!
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- Thanks a lot Ginger!!
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- Thanks Amro!
