Blake Hernandez
@loxstoplox
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PhD student @ UPenn | Mitosis, Cytoskeleton, Early Development, Microscopy & Computer Vision
Philadelphia, PA
Joined April 2019
I’m excited, relieved, and honored to announce that my paper describing non-canonical mitotic mechanisms in the early mouse embryo is out in @ScienceMagazine ! (link at end of 🧵)
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RT @TakashiAkeraLab: 🚨Our latest work on selfish centromeres published at @CurrentBiology 🐭🧬We found that the spindle checkpoint contribute….
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RT @onenimesa: Have you ever thought about inflating tissues? .Or maybe quickly deflating those inflated tissues? . New #EpithelialMechan….
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RT @spirochrome: Let's start the week with this movie kindly shared by @loxstoplox. The movie depicts live imaging of an early mouse embryo….
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Marvin Minsky. When your main quest is AI, and inventing the confocal microscope is just a side quest.
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A big thank you to our collaborators and the entire lab for their support! And huge shoutout to UPenn alum and actin guru @aaandmoore for key technical advice during the early stages of the project!!.
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I won’t spoil the details of the entire paper here, but we also identified a network of branched actin at the metaphase spindle periphery that attenuates spindle size, offering a new explanation for the spindle scaling behavior seen in large acentriolar cells.
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Surprisingly, network contraction is not driven by myosin-2. We instead found that contractile stress is generated by filament disassembly within the crosslinked network. After nebd, formin dilution from the nuclear region triggers filament disassembly and network contraction.
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Actin to the rescue! A network of nuclear actin cables captures prophase chromosomes and contracts following nuclear envelope breakdown, gathering chromosomes towards the cell center. We show that this mechanism of chromosome organization is required to achieve mitotic fidelity.
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Even more puzzling, the first phase of mitotic chromosome organization (below) occurs independently of spindle microtubules. So then what cellular component generates the force necessary to organize chromosomes?
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It’s therefore puzzling that spindle assembly in the early embryo is highly inefficient, exemplified by comically disordered spindles during early mitosis (shown below).
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In the classical view of mitotic cell division, the spindle apparatus maintains principal control of chromosome capture and alignment. Any breakdown in spindle function can result in chromosome mis-segregation (below), producing daughter cells with abnormal chromosome numbers.
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Evaluating different deconvolution algorithms today. Behold the power of Richardson-Lucy!
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Actin waves + inverted LUTs 🤩 (bonus points if you can guess the cell type)
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