Thibaut Brunet
Evolutionary cell biology / evolution of morphogenesis / animal origins / choanoflagellates @institutpasteur.bsky.social
research.pasteur.fr/en/team/evolutionar…
- Full house for @wcratcliff.bsky.social’s 45-min summary of 15 years of experimental evolution (including 8 years of MuLTEE) @pasteur.fr
- In “Living Architectures” @manuelthery.bsky.social & lab brought the Musée d’Orsay to life by projecting micropatterned cytoskeletal architectures and migratory cells onto the museum’s architecture. Mesmerizing! Natura in minimis maxima
- A full house for our roundtable on #expansion microscopy @pasteur.fr. Many thanks to coorganisers Gael Moneron & Serge Bonnefoy and to all participants for great talks &discussions @echardlab-pasteur.bsky.social @gloverlab.bsky.social @jessmbryant.bsky.social PBI facility @thibautbrunet.bsky.social
- Thanks for organizing!
- Super looking forward to having you @wcratcliff.bsky.social! What a treat for our @pasteur.fr course students and our colleagues.
- Enjoyed “A dominant character”, @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social’s biography of JBS Haldane which is also - perhaps mostly - a love letter to the scientific mindset. “To be open to the unknown strangeness of the world”
- This really made me want to read Haldane’s essays (which come across as some kind of precursor to SJ Gould’s), but sadly they all seem out of print. If anyone has a second-hand collection they recommend…
- Our research scientist Núria Ros-Rocher won the 1st prize @zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social microscopy contest with this beautiful choano colony www.zeiss.fr/microscopie/... 🥳 C. flexa might not yet be a genetic model, but it is now at least a calendar model, which counts for something. I think.
- This controversy is such a rollercoaster... Yet, I'm hopeful we will come to a resolution soon-ish. People are coming up with bold new approaches (linkage, integrative phylogenomics), and while it takes inevitable time to identify their own pitfalls and artifacts, this is what progress looks like.
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View full threadNot fully insignificant, as this particulier question impacts e.g. our understanding of the evolution of some important features such as the nervous system. And having high-profile, widely scrutinized case studies like these helps improve methods that can then be more broadly applied - so... (1/2)
- ... there are good reasons people should care passionately about this. What is unneeded (but used to be common) is to express every claim or criticism in maximally personal terms - but I feel/hope this is becoming a thing of the past. (2/2)
- Snow @pasteur.fr
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- Happy new year Olaya!
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- Congrats Alex! 👏
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- Welcome! 🇫🇷
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- Congratulations @arnausebe.bsky.social et al! 👏 What a wonderful resource, and what a year for your lab 😀
- Farewell to the Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée @mnhn.fr before closing for 1.5 years… 👋🐋
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- Rénovations ! www.franceinfo.fr/replay-radio...
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- Yes - renovations for safety and accessibility for the disabled apparently, among other things.
- (in case you ask, the two emojis stand for “goodbye and farewhale”)
- An agenda-defining review for our field!
- Thanks @jcellsci.bsky.social for this opportunity to contribute to your centenary collection with our take on the state of the field - 10 years after its modern reincarnation 🧪🌍 W/ @alebenoit.bsky.social @eelcotromer.bsky.social @fritzlaylin.bsky.social journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
- Awesome opportunity to figure out the role of cytoplasmic bridges in choanos (or mESCs, if you're into those things somehow)
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- Congrats on being a great biochemist 👏😉
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- ☮️🦄🌈
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- There's also always been vitriolic debates (which can make for quite entertaining reading - Hackel vs Saville-Kent and the like). Still, we are moving past this and I think it is the right move, culturally and scientifically.
- I also feel (or hope) the conversation is becoming less adversarial. The spirit should be "Let's work together to resolve this" not "Let's kill so-and-so's paper!" This is vital if we want to attract/retain young scientists in the field. New generations are much less tolerant of toxicity, rightly so
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- Congrats Idoia! 👏
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- Yay! Congrats!
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- Congrats Ina!
- Come to be our colleague! Center of Paris, excellent facilities, research spanning the whole range of basic and biomedical life science topics, enthusiastic and collaborative colleagues, crème brûlée every Friday... What else could one want?
- 🔬 Call to create junior research groups at the Institut Pasteur Focus: Infectious diseases, host-microbe interactions, vaccines Special interest: AI methodologies 📅 Deadline: Feb 9, 2026 👥 2-12 years post-PhD Apply now 📝 research.pasteur.fr/en/call/crea... #JobOpportunity #Research
- In Philadelphia for #CellBio2025. First question of the immigration officer upon landing: “What is cell biology?” Oh boy.
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- One once asked me to recite a French poem (“Le corbeau et le renard”, about how flattery gets you anywhere… including though customs I guess)
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- Yes! Looks like I’ll likely *just* miss my own talk (and more sadly yours, but looking forward to catching up afterwards)
- Glad to say they seemed satisfied with my totally incoherent answer (“it’s, er, the biology of the cells”)
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View full threadHaving witnessed many HHMI labs during my postdoc, my impression was that many of them struggled to even productively spend all their money. At some point it seems logical that you just hit diminishing returns; systematic studies have come to the same conclusion. www.science.org/content/blog...
- I was in an HHMI lab myself and was/am very grateful of their support for basic research; yet I couldn't escape the strong impression that they could fund twice as many people with grants half the size, still be very generous, and bring a net benefit to science and the world.
- What strikes me is that the amount and duration seem to be an exact duplicate of the HHMI model: 7 years, 1 million/year. One could consider emulating many aspects of the US system, but I'm not sure HHMI resource allocation strategy is the best choice.
- Wow! Remarkably complete story on the logic of phenotypic plasticity in a predatory protist - congrats @cellraiser.bsky.social et al!
- How do cells adapt morphology to function? In a 🔥 preprint by @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social , with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @amyweeks.bsky.social , we identify a self-organizing single-cell morphology circuit that optimizes the feeding trap structure of the suctorian P. collini. 🧵 tinyurl.com/4k8nv926
- I hear one is supposed to add #ProtistsOnSky after such posts. Not sure what will happen first, suctorians evolving into something else, or me remembering this.
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- A really big Asgard
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- It would be a real shame to lose you. Geographical constraints make things harder, but it’s really a numbers game and this paper being out can only give you momentum… Hang in there (and feel free to reach out if I can be of any help)
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- 👏
- Thoughtful thread on the latest in the sponge/ctenophore controversy (and the answer is… that you’ll have to click on Jacob’s thread 🙃)
- NEW pub in @science.org 🥳 Is it sponges (panels A & B) or comb jellies (C & D) that root the animal tree of life? For over 15 years, #phylogenomic studies have been divided. We provide new evidence suggesting that... 🔗: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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- Congrats on this being out! 👏 hope you are not hiding under a rock 😅
- The American Library in Paris has quite a few nice scientific biographies - I guess I got my winter reading sorted
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- Agree, Labatut’s writing is remarkable.
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- Ah thanks for the rec! I really enjoyed the first chapter of "When we cease to understand the world" by Labatut but then got a bit unsettled by the unannounced mixture of facts and fiction in the rest of the book. Is that one different?
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- Agreed, this is really good (unpaywalled link if it can be useful to some: archive.is/lqSrX)
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View full threadOverall, I'm not sure ChatGPT or Claude with a well-crafted prompt wouldn't do as well or better (speaking of... qed doesn't really tell how their AI was coded or trained. No strong reason to think it's just ChatGPT or Claude with a well-crafted prompt, but no reason to think it is not, either.)
- It's presented as an "author-facing tool", and on this I have no objection - you can always use it and keep what you find useful. It would be a disaster to outsource peer review to it, however. And as it improves and the problems/biases become more insidious, I suspect the temptation will grow.
