Zak Swartz

Destigmatize getting things wrong sometimes! Science can gracefully self-correct if we allow it. Well done all around. The cteno vs. sponge saga continues...

sounds cool!!

We are thrilled to invite you to the Michael Sars Symposium 2026 - Living systems in a variable ocean, together with our co-organizers at @cbubergen.bsky.social! Mark June 4, 2026 in your calendars, and watch out for our speaker lineup reveal in the new year 🙌

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

Confocal microscopy image of a juvenile sea star (Patiria miniata) viewed from the oral side. The animal has a five-armed, star-shaped body with a central nerve ring. The nervous system is labeled in green, forming radial nerve cords extending into each arm, and cell nuclei are labeled in red throughout the animal. The image appears against a black background and has a holiday-ornament-like appearance.

Felt a little festive at the microscope this morning for #FluorescenceFriday 🎄

Here’s the nervous system of a juvenile sea star ⭐️

Green = acetylated tubulin, red = nuclei

Happy holidays!

We're approaching "I'm thrilled to announce" season on the socials, with the academic job cycle progressing along. Yes, it can be rough out there - *and you are doing awesome* - whether you land that interview or not! 👍💯

Happy holidays, all ⭐🐟

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.

Alternate proteins from the same gene contribute differently to health and rare disease | Whitehead Institute Iain Cheeseman and colleagues reveal the underappreciated role of single genes producing multiple proteins in atypical presentations of rare disease, and present case studies of affected patients thro...

From an accidental discovery of hidden biology to a new framework to understanding and diagnosing rare disease. Thrilled to share the most recent work from our lab and the amazing Jimmy Ly.

wi.mit.edu/news/alterna...

A versatile cohesion manipulation system probes female reproductive age-related egg aneuploidy - Nature Aging To study pathways that lead to aneuploidy during aging, the authors provide a system that enables cohesion protein depletion in mouse oocytes, mimicking effects that occur during aging. They uncover a...

We built a targeted protein degradation–based system to mimic reproductive age-related aneuploidy in young eggs - revealing how chromosome errors associated with female infertility arise with age. 🧬✨
With @jiyeonleem.bsky.social and our team at Yale MCDB.

Read: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Come work with us!

The dynamics of centromere assembly and disassembly during quiescence Quiescence is a state in which cells undergo a prolonged proliferative arrest while maintaining their capacity to reenter the cell cycle. Here, we analyze entry and exit from quiescence, focusing on h...

New preprint! Graduate student Océane Marescal leverages quiescence - proliferative hibernation - to reveal unexpected dynamics for “constitutively”-localized centromere proteins. To understand the logic of cell division, you need to consider non-dividing cells.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

mmm, striper

I hope to take a PhD student in 2026 to study siphonophores. Please reach out if you are interested in applying this fall. For examples of recent lab projects see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... and academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

This postdoc position is still open! Apply if you want to come work with us on asymmetric cell divisions in spiralian embryos! postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

Up Close with Urchins: Undergrads Collect Lab Specimens on the Gemma | Marine Biological Laboratory

A little late with this one, but we got to go hunting for sea urchins on Gemma with the Semester in Biological Discovery (SBD) students. Thanks Captain David Bank and naturalist Scott Bennett, and Alex Megerle for the great writeup! 🌊🌊🌊

www.mbl.edu/news/close-u...

Love this article! Feeling pumped to share the awesomeness of echinoderms again very soon in Embryology 2025

We have shared detailed protocols for the expression, purification, and use of VitelloTag-Cas9 (in sea stars) on our website. We hope that this will be a useful starting place for working in your own favorite organism!
www.theswartzlab.org/tools-and-pr...

VitelloTag: a tool for high-throughput cargo delivery into oocytes Summary: VitelloTag, a method for transporting protein cargo into oocytes, facilitates microinjection-free CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in multiple species.

At last! The plasmids from our VitelloTag paper ( journals.biologists.com/dev/article/... ) are now available on Addgene: www.addgene.org/browse/artic...

We hope they might be useful for you to deliver Cas9 in your favorite organism. Stay tuned for detailed protocols on our lab website.

Another terrific Developmental Biology of the Sea Urchin & Other Marine Invertebrates is done! Thank you to all attendees for sharing your awesome science, the co-organizers for their hard work, our sponsors, and @mblscience.bsky.social for being such a great venue. Photo credit to Bob Morris 👏

Honored to have given the keynote lecture at the DBSUMI meeting. Such an exciting dev bio community!

Thanks @zakswartz.bsky.social for the invitation and kind hospitality at wonderful @mblscience.bsky.social. The naturalist approach to science and rich history in this place are inspiring.

Also a blast from the past! Another preprint is now available from my first postdoc in the @arnonelab.bsky.social at @szndohrn.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A versatile cohesion manipulation system reveals CENP-A dysfunction accelerates female reproductive age-related egg aneuploidy. Female reproductive aging is accompanied by a dramatic rise in the incidence of egg aneuploidy. Premature loss of chromosome cohesion proteins and untimely separation of chromosomes is thought to unde...

Some good news during these difficult times. Please check out our new preprint. We built a new tool to probe the origins of high oocyte aneuploidy rates at advanced female reproductive ages. This NIH funded work was led by a fantastic postdoc in the lab, Jiyeon Leem. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint from my Postdoc in Zak Swartz’s lab at the @mblscience.bsky.social, in collaboration with Carsten Wolff and @. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint drop! Check out work from @jimmy-ly.bsky.social et al for how protein isoforms generated by alternate translation initiation create dual localization, contribute to mitochondrial function, and are mutated in disease. "Blue-tutorial" thread below.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...