Marine Biological Laboratory

It's been a great year at the Marine Biological Laboratory. MBL Director Nipam Patel and Chairman of the Board of Trustees Bill Huyett share insights into the progress we've made with our programs, and the future ahead. Their message underscores the importance of our MBL community (both locally and beyond) and the community’s impact on our continued success. Thank you for your past support and please consider supporting MBL's future today. go.mbl.edu/give

Another movie to share from the students who took the Comparative Developmental Biology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory.?Shown here is the pupal forewing of a Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui), which is roughly 7mm in length.?We routinely get great high-resolution confocal images that show the developing scales, using DAPI to reveal the nuclei and Phalloidin to highlight the scale morphology, but unless we want to image for days, we can obtain such detailed images for only a tiny region of a wing.?Abhishek Kumar, Rylie Walsh, and Matthew Parent in our Imaging Innovation Lab have built and maintain a line scanning confocal that can rapidly scan large sample at high resolution (and from above and below simultaneously), and they are always willing to help scientists take advantage of all the great microscopes that they have built.?Two students in the course,?Nicolas A. Miranda Diaz and?Ethan Wold, dissected and stained this wing to see if the linescan confocal would work to get a high-resolution scan of the entire wing.?As you can see from this movie, this worked great (and this was significantly downsampled so I could make the movie on my aging laptop)!?One can zoom into any region of the wing and clearly see individual scales and their morphology (DAPI in blue and Phalloidin in magenta).?This will be an incredibly powerful approach we can use in the future as we search for genes responsible for controlling scale morphology and nanostructure production during wing development.?Thanks also to Neeharika Verma and Gabby Jerz for providing invaluable assistance with the experiment.

It's #MicroscopyMonday, so let's take a peek into the ?? This image of sunflower pollen on an acupuncture needle placed 14th in the 2023 Nikon Small World competition. 40x objective lens magnification and captured with image stacking. Credit: John-Oliver Dum, Medienbunker Produktion

Did you know that resident and visiting researchers at the MBL study sea robin “legs” to better understand how new limbs form during development and how novel forms of locomotion evolve in vertebrates. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/e_fZ4MwX Photo: Daniel Cojanu

For more than 30 years, the Falmouth Forum, presented by the Friends of the MBL, has brought free cultural enrichment to our community. This season features captivating speakers that will deliver powerful talks with a wide range of subjects. Our next talk is Friday, November 22 with biologist Michael Dawson. “The Horseshoe Crab: Ancient Mariner and Modern Medicine” Mark your calendars! https://lnkd.in/eZ7vtSv3

In case you missed it: Using two specialized microscopes invented at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), a team of researchers from Japan and the MBL have developed a new method to measure the forces that keep the nucleus centered in a living cell. The experiments also provided important new clues about the properties of cellular cytoplasm and the mechanisms of organelle motion within cells. The work was published Oct. 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/em3P_x5w Video: Time-lapse movie of the C. elegans embryo mounted in the CPM with a rotation speed of 2,500 rpm (520×g, corresponding to Fig. 1C and Fig. 1D(ii)). Initially, the rotation speed was kept at 500 rpm (21 ×g) until just before the meeting (“10:29:38” at the second from left at the bottom), and then the speed was increased. The speed reached 2,500 rpm 44 s later (“10:32:22”). Playback speed ×100. Credit: Makoto Goda et al. (2024)

In this NPR segment on biomimicry, MBL's Joshua Rosenthal explains how robust RNA editing mechanisms in the squid are illuminating potential human medical applications, such as for chronic pain relief, with reporter Karen Brown of New England Public Radio. His segment begins about 27:00.

This is why I love TAing at this wonderful course at Marine Biological Laboratory. The DL@MBL course is a great way to see how two worlds of AI and Microscopy/Biology collide and how that can have awesome outcomes. It was a pleasure to be a TA and working with team restorators last year. Cheers ?? ??????

A spotlight on biotech companies focused on translating RNA editing to medical therapies.

A very cool video captured during our new Comparative Developmental Biology course and shared by MBL Director Nipam Patel.