Friends, if you or anyone you know wants a job as a scientific illustrator on my team at Università di Pavia, please have them reach out to me to discuss options! Thanks.

just for the pleasure of it, the fine choreography of epithelial cell migration with a PI3K mutation. This is the complex behavior we have to drug to treat cancer ... Movie from Lucien Hinderling . Switch sound on.

1/2 pre-prints to end the year! Synthetic Physiology Lab is happy to present *CALIPERS: Cell cycle-Aware Live Imaging for Phenotyping Experiments and Regeneration Studies* led by @moisesdisante and in collaboration with the amazing Alessandro Bertero and Florian Jug labs biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

And here is pre-print 2/2 before the end of the year! *HYDRA: HYdrogel Dispensing with Robotic Automation* - a scalable solution for drug testing. Great work by Eloisa Torchia, her team Synthetic Physiology Lab and the labs of Sylvain Gabriele Elisa Cimetta and Lind biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Why HYDRA? Traditional high-throughput screening (HTS) platforms rely on stiff substrates (plastic/glass) that poorly mimic tissue environments. Our solution combines physiological stiffness with standard imaging capabilities to improve preclinical drug testing accuracy.

HYDRA prevents meniscus formation during hydrogel casting, achieving flat, planar layers. Using robotic liquid handling, we dispense & re-aspirate hydrogel precursors to create tunable 10-50 μm gel layers.

What’s in the gel? We used fish gelatin crosslinked with microbial transglutaminase, enabling precise control over stiffness and maintaining compatibility with liquid handling robots. Results? Physiological stiffness for cell culture.

HYDRA is scalable! From 96-well to 384-well plates, we demonstrated consistent quality. Automated fabrication ensures reproducible thickness and flatness, with >90% successful wells in HTS plates.

Validated for drug testing: Using epithelial cells and holographic imaging, HYDRA reveals distinct cell responses to nocodazole & paclitaxel. Confluency analysis showed the importance of biomimetic substrates.

HYDRA supports fluorescence microscopy, enabling cell-cycle and cytoskeletal analyses with FUCCIplex sensors using CALIPERS (biorxiv.org/content/10.110…). From cell proliferation to mitotic spindle dynamics, this method works with cutting-edge imaging and image-analysis modalities.

In conclusion, HYDRA is a cost-effective, HTS-compatible solution that integrates seamlessly into existing pharma workflows, ideally making early preclinical drug testing more predictive. Thoughts, questions, or collaborations? Let’s connect.

Paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Team on X: Eloisa Torchia Melissa Pezzotti Julius Zimmermann Bohdana Horda Elisa Cimetta Sylvain Gabriele X-less: Ale Enrico, Marko Mihajlovic, Johan Lind, Ferdinando Auricchio Gear: Nikon Microscope Solutions CrestOptics Okolab Curi Bio Spirochrome

Preprints from the lab stemming from our European Research Council (ERC) project #SYNBIO.ECM Università di Pavia 1. Combining FUCCI with live cell phenotypic? Introducing CALIPERS

2. Combining hydrogels with high throughput screening? Easy, with HYDRA!! x.com/fspasqualini/s…

New chapter In our quest to use discrete mechanics across biological scales just published in Langmuir pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac… great work from Saranya and her team merging quantum, molecular, and coarse grain dynamics to investigate the basis of hyaluronic acid hydrogel

How to turn a layer of fibroblasts into a tulip 🌷? Check out our new pre-print on shape-programmable living surfaces. Led by Pau Guillamat IBEC biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

🚀 CALIPERS v2 preprint is locked—journal submission next. Final polish, more hiPSC reference lines, and fresh light-sheet data. Still, a great collaboration led by @moisesdisante with the team Synthetic Physiology Lab and the amazing Alessandro Bertero and Florian Jug group members!

We’re hiring! 🚀 Junior Lab Tech / PhD student (cell & mol-bio) to push our Calipers tech into 3D #gastruloids. Must already have Italy work permit (sorry, can’t sponsor). Love stem cells + CRISPR? DM or send CV by 31 Aug 2025. #hiring #StemCells

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