Timothy Saunders: There’s been exciting work recently linking ideas from topology to biological systems. This has ranged from bird flocking (www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....), to gene networks (www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....), and now how nuclei pack in the Drosophila blastocyst (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

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Timothy Saunders timesaunders.bsky.social
There’s been exciting work recently linking ideas from topology to biological systems. This has ranged from bird flocking (www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....), to gene networks (www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....), and now how nuclei pack in the Drosophila blastocyst (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).
Geometry of gene regulatory dynamics | PNAS

Embryonic development leads to the reproducible and ordered appearance of complexity from egg to adult. The successive differentiation of different...

pnas.org
Mar 13, 2025 11:02
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Timothy Saunders timesaunders.bsky.social · Mar 13, 2025
Such topological behaviour has also been shown to potentially play a role in cell extrusion (www.nature.com/articles/nat...). I wrote a short commentary on this, which is hopefully accessible for the more general audience (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).
Topological defects in epithelia govern cell death and extrusion - Nature

By modelling epithelial cells as active nematic liquid crystals, stresses induced at the sites of topological defects are found to be the primary drivers of extrusion and cell death.

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Timothy Saunders timesaunders.bsky.social · Mar 13, 2025
With Ivo Telley, we have looked at packing of nuclei in ex vivo systems (journals.biologists.com/dev/article/..., elifesciences.org/articles/90541). It’s exciting to see how quantitative measurements reveal deeper insight into how biological systems reliably generate complex form from simple rules.
Aster repulsion drives short-ranged ordering in the Drosophila syncytial blastoderm

Summary: The multinucleated embryo of the fruit fly D. melanogaster distributes nuclei with the help of centrosome-organised microtubule asters, with ordering dynamically adapting to synchronous nucle...

journals.biologists.com

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Timothy Saunders timesaunders.bsky.social · Mar 13, 2025
Of course, biology likes to be complicated. The above work generally takes the microtubule interaction between nuclei to be repulsive - but this doesn’t have to be the case (www.nature.com/articles/s41...). Future work will hopefully reveal how general these principles are.
Nuclear speed and cycle length co-vary with local density during syncytial blastoderm formation in a cricket - Nature Communications

Early in insect embryo development, many nuclei share one large cell, travel varied paths and self-organize into a single layer. Donoughe et al. illuminate this process with live-imaging, modeling, an...

nature.com

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