Archives: News

Welcome Nicole

Welcome to our lab, Nicole! Nicole will be investigating the influence of temperature and other environmental factors on embryonic development. She will be working as joint PhD student with Prof. Luc Brendonck (KU Leuven).  

Bartosz joins the 22nd International Conference on Systems Biology in Hartford, Connecticut, USA 

Bartosz has participated at the 22nd International Conference on Systems Biology held in Hartford, Connecticut, USA, between the 8th and 12th of October. At the conference, Bartosz gave a talk on the results of his recent preprint ‘Data-driven discovery of oscillator models using SINDy: Towards the application on experimental data in biology’ (see here). In …

Bartosz joins the 22nd International Conference on Systems Biology in Hartford, Connecticut, USA  Read More »

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

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 »

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

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 …

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

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 …

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

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 »

Cell cycle oscillations driven by two interlinked bistable switches

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 »

Welcome Martina!

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.