David A. Salamanca-Diaz

Join us this next Friday *the 13th* 👻 👻 to hear us talking about bones and cartilages in development and evolution 🐟 🐠 🦴

Figure showing 3 panels,(A) a picture of annelid Capitella teleta on black background, (B) a cladogram with major biological model organisms showing the phylogenetic position of C. teleta and (C) schematics of the 10 chromosomes of C. teleta

New from @chemamd.bsky.social lab @qmulsbbs.bsky.social Collab with Elaine Seaver, @baxevanislab.bsky.social @neva-meyer.bsky.social @abhinavsur.bsky.social

New chromosome-level assembly for Capitella teleta 🪱

academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...

#DevBio
#WormWednesday
@genomebiolevol.bsky.social

Happy to share scHiCAR, an ultra-high throughout (millions of cells), low cost (5 cents/cell including NGS), and trimodal platform for integrated single-cell level analysis of mRNA, open chromatin, and 5-kb resolution looping with ground-truth data the same individual cell.

I think that, like with art, papers offer an opportunity for you to tell the story your own way. Could another person research the same question? Yes. However, each person has the opportunity to do it and communicate it in their own way, and we must protect that 🧪

POV of the sea from the PRBB in Barcelona

Hello from Barcelona!

Thrilled to announce my recent joining of the @arnausebe.bsky.social Lab at CRG with the support of a Beatriu de Pinós fellowship. Glad to be back in the city that saw me grow as a scientist.

More more single cell omics, more evo-devo, more weird organisms... coming soon!

Un viaggio all’origine dei sistemi nervosi Il nuovo progetto GRNevo, finanziato con un grant FIS-3 Advanced da 1,9 milioni di euro, studierà come si formano i neuroni durante lo sviluppo in specie animali molto distanti tra loro: dal moscerino...

Thrilled to share that I’ve been awarded a FIS-3 Advanced Grant (ERC-inspired) to study the evolution of neurogenic GRNs.
Recruiting soon: 4 postdocs + 3 PhDs
Press release in Italian — to decolonise scientific language 😄
magazine.unibo.it/it/articoli/...
Email me if interested in joining the lab

Decoding cnidarian cell type gene regulation - Nature Ecology & Evolution This study reconstructs the gene regulatory networks that define cell types in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis, providing a valuable resource for comparative regulatory genomics and the evoluti...

Excited to share the final version of our study on Nematostella cell type regulatory programs. Part of our @erc.europa.eu StG project, this was a challenging 5-year effort extraodinarily led by @aelek.bsky.social and @martaig.bsky.social.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Networks are #complex and their dynamics often look chaotic. But we can reconstruct latent spaces where their behavior becomes strikingly regular, revealing functional organization across biology, society and technology.

How? 👉 rdcu.be/eSsqn 🧪🧠🦠🧬🌐

Kudos to Andrea, @dzanc.bsky.social & Sebastiano!

Your periodic reminder that science is not done by a few selected "stars scientists". Science is done by hundred of thousands. Siloed money mean a few flashy discoveries and a lot of waste. Want to change things? Make funding accessible and stop funding calls with less than 2% success rate.

Very happy to announce that our article in multimodal single cell analyses in planaria is out in Nature Communications @natcomms.nature.com ! Thank you very much to everyone that made this work possible. I am very happy to see it out (: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Separation of the Early gastrula into oral and aboral halves shows that some neural cell tupes derive from aboral ectoderm, and others from i-cells

Drawing together findings from several projects over many years, we make a case that neural cell types in the Clytia larva have two embryological origins: i-cells and ectodermal.
bioRxiv 2025.11.17.688882; doi: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🧬 PhD Position: Evolutionary & Comparative Genomics 🕷️
Join us at @uni-goettingen.de for a 3-year PhD (65% TV-L E13).
We will investigate the genomic & phenotypic impact of gene duplication across 233 arthropod genomes!
More infos 👇 and s.gwdg.de/eDrAAY
#Evolution #Genomics #Bioinformatics

It's an artistic representation of a circulatory system walking through a kitchen, as drawn by Dave Gibbons and written about by Alan Moore. It happens a lot 'round here.

Happy There Is A Circulatory System Walking Through The Kitchen Day to all who celebrate.

a, Global average temperature and the timing of large igneous province (LIP). Modified from ref. 108. b, Palaeo-ocean acidification events during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Solid red lines represent confirmed ocean acidification events. Dashed orange lines represent disputed ocean acidification events. c, Morphological simplification in brachiopods and foraminifera reduces the increased calcification energy caused by ocean acidification across the PTME and T-OAE in this study. AOAE, Aptian oceanic anoxic event; CALIP, Central Atlantic LIP; COAE, Cenomanian oceanic anoxic event; DLIP, Deccan LIP; KFLIP, Karoo-Ferrar LIP; KPgME, Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction; NALIP, North Atlantic LIP; N-MLIP, Naturaliste-Madagascar LIP; PETM, Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum; STLIP, Siberian Traps LIP; TJME, Triassic–Jurassic mass extinction.

Around extinction events, the shape of shells of certain groups becomes simpler. It's a sort of austerity measure to reduce the energy cost associated with producing a shell. Might be something we need to keep an eye out for in marine organisms now. 🧪🌊

Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join our "Advances in Single-Cell Technologies" meeting in December in Freiburg, co-organised with Marco Prinz and @katrinkierdorf.bsky.social. Excellent line-up of speakers covering spatial technologies, lineage tracing, computational methods, and more.
www.uniklinik-freiburg.de/single-cell-...

Are you a PI in a biology field looking for postdocs? Here is a Starter Pack of early career biologists currently seeking postdoctoral positions! (Also if you are searching for a postdoc, let me know if you want to be added!) go.bsky.app/8zZNEGV

This is a really cool idea to make use of bluesky! Can I be added?

A single-cell ATACseq atlas of our favourite sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis! By @aelek.bsky.social @martaig.bsky.social

An episodic burst of massive genomic rearrangements and the origin of non-marine annelids - Nature Ecology & Evolution An analysis of annelid genomes reveals massive reshuffling of chromosomes in the ancestral lineage leading to clitellates, a clade composed of non-marine annelids, with potential implications for the ...

Glad to see this paper finally out! An episodic burst of massive genomic rearrangements and the origin of non-marine annelids
@natecoevo.nature.com @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social @csic.es @erc.europa.eu www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Chordin-mediated BMP shuttling patterns the secondary body axis in a cnidarian Chordin-mediated BMP shuttling is the candidate mechanism for generating bilateral symmetry in the cnidarian-bilaterian ancestor.

David’s @davidmoersdorf.bsky.social cool paper about the role of Chordin in BMP signaling in the sea anemone Nematostella is finally out www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The anti-neural role of BMP signaling is a side effect of its global function in dorsoventral patterning In Bilateria with centralized nervous systems (e.g. in vertebrates or arthropods), the minimum of the BMP signaling activity gradient defines the position of the central nervous system. BMP-dependent ...

The last part of @paulknabl.bsky.social 's PhD is now available at www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Paul showed that BMP signaling is active in the diffuse nervous system of the sea anemone Nematostella and the box jellyfish Tripedalia. Moreover, suppression of BMP signaling in Nematostella leads...

I’ve been studying gene regulation in primates for over 20 years, and using RNA-seq since 2008 to compare expression across species. We thought we were being careful. We used curated orthologous exons to minimize alignment bias and focused on biologically meaningful comparisons.

We were wrong.

ATAC‐seq in Emerging Model Organisms: Challenges and Strategies Principle of ATAC-seq (left), overview of arthropod species with published ATAC-seq data (middle), summary of experimental design (right).

You want to apply #ATACseq in your emerging model organism, but you don't know where to start? Is #ATACseq the best method for my research questions? Search no more! We got you covered with our new review: doi.org/10.1002/jez.... Excellent collaboration with @gevol.bsky.social

Analyzing your single-cell data by mapping to a reference atlas? Then how do you know the mapping actually worked, and you’re not analyzing mapping-induced artifacts? We developed mapQC, a mapping evaluation tool www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... from the ‪@fabiantheis lab. Let’s dive in🧵

It's finally here! Great start of the summer. We got our latest preprint from @chemamd.bsky.social in @qmulsbbs.bsky.social @qmulse.bsky.social, showing evidence of developmental system drift in the specification of dorsoventral (belly vs back) axis in annelids 🪱🪱🪱
#DevBio #EvoDevo

Congrats Tim!!

Chromatin loops are an ancestral hallmark of the animal regulatory genome - Nature The physical organization of the genome in non-bilaterian animals and their closest unicellular relatives is characterized; comparative analysis shows chromatin looping is a conserved feature of genome architecture and spatial genome regulation emerged early in animal evolution.

Nature research paper: Chromatin loops are an ancestral hallmark of the animal regulatory genome

https://go.nature.com/4kcNObU

Proud to present the peer-reviewed version of our Cell Type Allometry paper, out today in Science Advances!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Are animals of different sizes made of the same cell types?

Here’s an update of the main points and revision items

(with memes!)

Thread 👇🧵

A digital drawing with dark blue text above saying “protect the” and the bottom text saying “weirdos”. There are four animals in between the text. The top left is a green and brown horned frog (aka Pac-Man frog). The top right is a pink and white flea beetle. The bottom left is a yellow slug. The bottom right is a kingsnake with grey and red scales. The background is light blue.

Last day of #invertefest so let’s end with one of my most popular pieces of art!

linktr.ee/squishyfauna

#invertebrates #bugsky #bugs #entomology #insects #herps #frogs #snakes #sciart #bsnm

Molluscan Shells, Spicules, and Gladii Are Evolutionarily Deeply Conserved Evolutionarily conserved transcription factor encoding genes and other genes are expressed in the epithelia that give rise to spicules (green) and/or shells (blue) in developmental stages of diverse ...

Finally out - our paper on shell field and spicule #EvoDevo in a variety of #mollusks such as #scaphopods, #cephalopods, #aplacophorans, and of course #polyplacophorans. Among others we show evolutionary highly conserved gene expression in aculiferan spicules onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...