Thanks Claudia ! Full credit to Maggie for making the story so epic in scope. Also: will you be at ASCB this year? Hope to see you again some time soon

Thanks Ben! You've set a high bar for protist excellence that continues to inspire and motivate our thinking :)

My jaw is still recovering tbh 😂 reconstructive surgery scheduled for next week

Finally – there are many mysteries to still resolve for these cells. From dramatic metamorphic capabilities🤯 to prey preference and detection mechanisms 🕵️. For anyone interested in collaborating or getting their hands on these cells, these fantastic beasts culture well and we’re happy to share!

We couldn’t have taken this study to the next level without Omaya and Marine from team @dudinlab.bsky.social and Amy and Lauren from team @amyweeks.bsky.social . Together their talents brought the additional molecular and structural clarity we needed to model this circuit’s behavior fully.

This work shines because of @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social passion for these cells. She built it all—the cultures, transcriptomes, analyses, modeling and collaborations—from scratch. I can’t begin to express how brilliant and hard-working a scientist she is (and she's 👀 for postdocs!). So proud of her 🥲

More broadly, this circuit’s architecture provides a general control logic for organizing number and size of natural and engineered sub-cellular structures. Morphological circuits like this one can be viewed as building blocks for cell structure, analogous to network motifs and circuit topologies.

While our model was built to describe P. collini’s trap scaling, we found that the trap geometries of other suctorian species from different niches could be modeled as re-parameterizations or extensions of this same core control logic!