I feel seen by my secret santander 🤣

@Thamarailingam0 decided to test if he could “recreate” the Bicoid gradient using just the Bicoid homeodomain and NLS::eGFP. Combining the two (on a Bicoid promoter), he showed that the NLS::eGFP profile could be morphed into a concentration gradient similar to Bicoid itself.

We found slow and fast components for Bicoid dynamics in both the cytoplasm and nucleus. Surprisingly, the Bicoid dynamics were different in the anterior and posterior. Bicoid diffuses more rapidly in the posterior. In contrast, a NLS::eGFP had similar dynamics across the embryo.

With Thorsten Wohland, we used fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) to measure Bicoid dynamics. FCS works better at low fluorophore numbers (to a point); this enabled us to measure Bicoid dynamics near the posterior pole.

Been a great few days at PLM22. Hopefully talk this afternoon goes well

Back in town. Mainly remember st johns as the shortcut between college and town centre.

But, at a tissue scale, we did see patterns. There is a wave of fusion events from medial to lateral sides of the tissue. Intriguingly, these correlated strongly with the movement of the slow fibres (11/21)

Cells fused end-to-end, side-to-side, and everything in-between. In vivo, the process of fusion is very heterogeneous at a single cell level, both in time and space, and also orientation of fusion events (8/21)

This data gave us the opportunity to track (nearly) every cell from somite segmentation through to myotome maturation. We identified both slow and fast muscle populations. (4/21)

Of course, the fish is growing during this period. @MarioMendieta_S and @MBIsg microscopy developed a tool to correct for tail movement, enabling us to keep the region of interest in view over ~16 hours of imaging