My main postdoc work is finally out as a preprint! In this study, we investigate whether cell shape changes during cell state transitions can be described as a particle moving in a morphogenetic landscape, similar to gene expression trajectories in a Waddington landscape. We were super excited when we found that this is not only possible when describing epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), but that cell shape changes during EMT are associated with a transient noise peak! A combination of mathematical modelling and experiments showed that this noise peak is robustly accelerating shape changes during EMT! Interested, have a look!

This has been a great collaboration with my awesome co-first author Iskra Yanakieva and together with Ewa Paluch and Guillaume Salbreux.

Cells are complex environments and this might have a large impact on how linear aggregates (e.g. amyloid fibrils that play an important role in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) form. In our new study, published in the Biophysical Journal, we investigate how the rheology of liquid droplets can affect the partitioning of irreversibly aggregating proteins.

This project was a great collaboration with Thomas Michaels (University of Zurich) and Christoph Weber (University of Augsburg). Stay tuned, we will soon publish more on this topic!

Want to find out how to harness the power of the strongest known molecular motor! Check out my new publication in Frontiers in Physics! Great collaboration with Vasily Zaburdaev!

Our study is part of the Research Topic on Active Matter in Complex Environments.

Our new paper on notochord development in amphioxus has now been published in Development!!!

First-author Toby did some impressive job in segmenting all the cells, giving us a perfect playground to do a thorough morphometric analysis of an in vivo system! That allowed us to investigate the complete range of cell shapes and how it depends on the developmental stage of the tissue. Additionally, by performing a pseudotime analysis, a tool commonly used to study RNAseq data, we could identify developmental gradients in the amphioxus notochord.

It was a lot of fun to work on that project together with Andrews from the group of Elia Benito-Gutiérrez from the Zoology department of Cambridge University.

My first publication with the Paluch lab is out since today!

It is a review about how cell shape and cell motion are linked to each other with a big focus on how shapes can be quantified. The link to the review can be found here:

Bodor, D.L., Pönisch, W., Endres, R.G. , Paluch, E.K. Of Cell Shapes and Motion: The Physical Basis of Animal Cell Migration. Developmental Cell 52:5 (2020).

Big thanks to Dani and Ewa to let me contribute to this work.

The group of Ewa Paluch, my postdoc supervisor, is now reaching the hot phase to move to Cambridge and since May 1st I am an official Research Associate at the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

I am also extremely grateful to have been awarded the Herchel Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship of the University of Cambridge, supporting me in my research on the crosstalk of cell shape and state for the coming three years.

Interesting times lie ahead…

I am very happy to announce that our paper on how bacteria use type IV pili to move over a substrate is published in PRE!

We find that a tug-of-war mechanism alone is able to explain the persistent motion of bacteria without including any directional memory. In our work, we also predict that substrate friction might play a major role during the motility of cell aggregates.

The paper can be found here: Pönisch, W., Weber, C.A. and Zaburdaev, V. Phys. Rev. E 99, 042419 (2019). The arxiv version can be found here: arxiv

This project has been one of my favorites in the last three years and I hope people will enjoy reading it.

Finally, our work on how cells move within bacterial colonies forming due to type IV pili is published in Scientific Reports. Identical cells of a colony are more motile at the surface of the colony than in the bulk. With the help of theoretical modelling, we find that this behavior emerges due to a gradient in the pili dynamics and the resulting forces. We also discover that the gradient of cell motility and forces correlate with a gene expression gradient, pointing towards early differentiation. Thanks to the Nicolas Biais lab and the Zaburdaev group.

Together with Christoph Weber and Vasily Zaburdaev, we published a new preprint in which we develop a stochastic model to study the substrate motility of bacteria and bacterial aggregates. We show that a previously observed persistent motility of Neisseria gonorrhoeae cells originates from a tug-of-war mechanism without any directional memory. We also find that sliding friction has a big impact on the motility of microcolonies!

Here is the link:
Pönisch, W., Weber. C.A., Zaburdaev, V. N. How bacterial cells and colonies move on solid substrates arXiv Preprint 1–24 (2018).