Archives: News

Liliana joined the 19th International Xenopus Conference held in Cambridge, Maryland, USA, between the 20th and 24th of August. During the conference, Lili presented her latest experimental work with a poster on how nuclei affect cell cycle timing using an artificial cell system consisting of droplets of Xenopus frog extracts. This work was carried out …

Liliana joins the 19th International Xenopus Conference in Cambridge, Maryland, USA Read More »

Many biochemical oscillators are driven by the periodic rise and fall of protein concentrations or activities. A negative feedback loop underlies such oscillations. The feedback can act on different parts of the biochemical network. Jan and Sarah mathematically compare time-delay models where the feedback affects production and degradation and how both mechanisms impose different constraints …

The ups and downs of biological oscillators: a comparison of time-delayed negative feedback mechanisms Read More »

Rapid increase of population and settlement structures in the Global South motivate the development of suitable models to describe their formation. Such settlement formation has been previously suggested to be dynamically driven by simple pattern-forming mechanisms. In this work Bartosz and our collaborators from TU Darmstadt explored the use of a data-driven white-box approach, called …

Challenges in identifying simple pattern-forming mechanisms in the development of settlements using demographic data Read More »

Lendert has shared the recent work of our lab at the biannual SIAM conference on the application of dynamical systems which took place in Portland, US, between the 14th and 18th of May 2023. In his talk titled, ‘Nuclei Serve as Pacemakers to Coordinate the Cell Cycle in Space and Time’ he discussed our recent …

Lendert gives a talk at the SIAM conference on Application of Dynamical Systems in Portland, US Read More »

Negative feedback is at the heart of cell cycle oscillations: active cyclin B-Cdk1 activates the Anaphase-Promoting Complex-Cyclosome, which triggers the degradation of cyclin B. In the early embryos of the frog Xenopus laevis, such cell cycle oscillations occur fast and periodically. In this paper by Pedro and Dani, we built several cell cycle oscillator models …

Cell cycle oscillations driven by two interlinked bistable switches Read More »

We are happy to welcome our new PhD student Martina to our lab! Martina studied biomedical engineering in Milan, Italy, where she was especially passionate about microfluidics and biosensors. In our group, she will use microfluidic approaches to study how frog egg extracts behave in different spatial and chemical environments.

Traveling pulses of vegetation are able to form strikingly complex seascapes as Dani and his former group have shown in Posidonia oceanica meadows. They prove that these spatiotemporal structures arise due to the excitable dynamics mediated by the accumulation of sulfides in the sediment, which are toxic to the plants, on the basis of mathematical …

Self-organized sulfide-driven traveling pulses shape seagrass meadows Read More »

Lendert joined the ASCB/EMBO Workshop ‘Cell Bio 2022’ which took place in Washington, D.C, US between the 3rd and 7th of December. During his talk, Lendert presented our recent theoretical work and discussed how the complexity of a cell cycle oscillator models can be reduced by replacing the detailed reaction mechanisms of ultrasensitive and bistable …

Lendert gives talk at Cell Bio 2022 (ASCB/EMBO Workshop) in Washington, D.C, US Read More »

After 4 years working on the development of a microfluidic device to gain additional control over frog egg extracts, Arno is starting a new chapter at Vito. Thank you for all your great work and being a wonderful person to work with. We will miss him and wish him all the best in this next …

Arno started a new chapter at Vito Read More »

Nikita, Bartosz and Daniel joined the IB² research day on Bioinformatics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels in November. Bartosz gave a talk presenting his recent work on the use of the data-driven machine learning techniques (SINDy) to identify biological oscillator models from time series. Nikita presented a poster on how cell cycle duration scales with …

Bartosz and Nikita join the IB² research day in Brussels, Belgium Read More »