and special thanks to the fab all-female panel (+ @briancoxtalks.bsky.social 😆) for being such delightful people to discuss with! @joyceharper.bsky.social @lucyvandewiel.bsky.social & Güneş Taylor! @crick.ac.uk

Well done for writing this Bethan! A really interesting read and some important points here on how we can all do better. 👏

Congrats Ina! Very well deserved, and so lovely to read your interview in the attached link 👏 hope you're celebrating well! 🍾

This work was led by postdoc, Komal, and research scientist, Louise, @theCrick with the help of lots of others. The link to our biorxiv manuscript can be found here: biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... Feedback welcome, thanks for reading! 🙏 (7/7)

Thus, we found feedback in both directions, causing patterning important for organogenesis. The simple ‘modularity’ of hTLS that let us investigate in the presence/absence of certain tissues, could help us understand co-development, esp in a human context (6/7)

So we looked at signalling between the 2 tissues. As predicted from animals, RA is needed for PAX6+ but not neurogenesis. Plus, ALDH1A2 (which synthesises RA) was only in the medial somite - implying neural tube signalling was reciprocally patterning the somites! (5/7)

BUT without a notochord, hTLS are dorsal. Exposure to SAG makes them ‘ventralise’ dose-dependently. Doing this, we noticed something interesting… the NT cells next to the somites were different from the other side. Communication between tissues was setting up an axis... (4/7)

hTLS show self-organised wavefront signalling and oscillations to form somites; Neuromesodermal progenitors support elongation and become depleted over time; HOX genes show we’re at thoracic/lumbar regions… (3/7)

hTLS are an embryo model that mirrors development using human cells. We used 7 cell lines + optimised to make it robust. The neural tube forms through a 2ndry neurulation-like process. Bioinformatically, hTLS cells are most like Carnegie Stage13-14 embryos (~day 28!) (2/7)