Dear EMBRIOphytes,

I hope everyone was able to enjoy the holiday break. I had the pleasure of taking my sister and her family (who reside in Florida) to the frigid ❄️ Friday night Purdue vs. Indiana football game... to ensure no one would lose a toe or finger we vacated ⛷ after the half-time show ⛄ .  Announcements include a reminder to invited labs to attend today's All-Hands data management session, a poll for your input on summer events, and a highlight of the awesome review paper in APL Bioengineering co-authored by members of the Calcium Signaling Journal Club:

Today 3pm Data Management Session for Invited Labs
Today's EMBRIO All-Hands Lab is dedicated to meeting with specific invited computational and experimental labs on data management tasks and needs. All are welcome, though if you received an email from me last week about attending this session, please do tune in - those who have a time conflict we can get with you another time before the semester ends. Computational labs will likely take 15 minutes or less once we cover GitHub and PURR, and the few experimental labs invited we will use the balance of time to address any imaging data tasks and needs going forward.


We Need Your Input: Dates, Plans, Topics for EMBRIO 2026 Summer School & Joint Symposium
A joint EMBRIO BII NSF - Notre Dame (RECODE NSF) one day symposium and poster session has been proposed focused on "Advancing Morphogenetic Biosciences and Bioengineering”, coupled with a multi-day training at the intersection of AI-levered computational modeling, quantitative biology, and bioengineering (e.g. https://sai.nd.edu/). The Symposium will feature EMBRIO speakers, along with speakers from Notre Dame, and invited Key Notes. Proposed to be hosted at our partners at University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, EMBRIO will organize and help provide transportation and lodging for Purdue members to attend, as well as reimburse travel for EMBRIO trainees from our partner institutions to participate. 

Please use this brief online poll to capture your availability, plans and preferences, as well as ideas for training topics: https://purdue.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bkIw8bHUboD9Qwu


New EMBRIO Paper in APL Bioengineering! 
This integrative review exploring the “Rules of Life” at the interface of Calcium Signaling and Mechanobiology involved nine EMBRIO labs spanning all of our biological thrust areas and the Core Thrust! This work focuses on how Ca2+ regulates and is regulated by cytoskeletal dynamics, with a particular emphasis on computational modeling for predictive simulations. 
In exploring a Rules of Life (RoL) perspective, the team defined and reviewed the multi-scalar principles governing the relationships between calcium signaling and cellular mechanics and organization:


🔗 Link to Paper: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0284022

Congrats to the entire team for this major accomplishment! Linlin Li and David Gazzo contributed equally to this work as co-first authors, while Shams Mowafak Saad, Nissa Larson, Eugene Kim, and Nilay Kumar contributed equally as co-second authors. Jeremiah Zartman, as the senior author, organized and supervised the Calcium Signaling Journal Club that led to this exciting publication.

Li, L., Gazzo, D., Saad, S., Larson, N., Kim, E., Kumar, N., Mim, M., Krishnan, M., Speybroeck, B., Ding, C., Mullins, M., Pascuzzi, A., Deng, Q., Pienaar, E., Evans, J., Umulis, D., Zartman, J. Rules of Life at the Interface of Calcium Signaling and Mechanobiology. Open Access November 26, 2025. APL Bioengineering. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0284022



Calcium signaling and actin dynamics during wound response. (a) Single-cell Ca2+-actin dynamics in wound response. Localized wounding induces a rapid increase in Ca2+ concentration, which triggers the formation of an actin ring around the nucleus, followed by an actin reset to restore normal cytoskeletal organization once healed. (b) Ca2+ and actin dynamics at the multi-cell level in response to wounding. Tissue wounding triggers a Ca2+ increase in surrounding cells, propagating a Ca2+ wave across the tissue. This leads to the coordinated formation of an actin ring at the wound site, promoting collective wound closure. (c) Generalized intracellular Ca2+ dynamics upon wounding across species. Intracellular Ca2+ levels rise through calcium channel influx across the plasma membrane or release from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) through the IP3 Ca2+ signaling pathway following recognition of a damage/microbe-associated molecular pattern (DAMP/MAMP), chemokines, or other stimulus, activating G protein pathways. Figure created in BioRender.

FIG. 2 (from paper)
Calcium signaling and actin dynamics during wound response. (a) Single-cell Ca2+-actin dynamics in wound response. Localized wounding induces a rapid increase in Ca2+ concentration, which triggers the formation of an actin ring around the nucleus, followed by an actin reset to restore normal cytoskeletal organization once healed. (b) Ca2+ and actin dynamics at the multi-cell level in response to wounding. Tissue wounding triggers a Ca2+ increase in surrounding cells, propagating a Ca2+ wave across the tissue. This leads to the coordinated formation of an actin ring at the wound site, promoting collective wound closure. (c) Generalized intracellular Ca2+ dynamics upon wounding across species. Intracellular Ca2+ levels rise through calcium channel influx across the plasma membrane or release from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) through the IP3 Ca2+ signaling pathway following recognition of a damage/microbe-associated molecular pattern (DAMP/MAMP), chemokines, or other stimulus, activating G protein pathways. Figure created in BioRender.





Brent T. Ladd, Senior Research Program Manager, EMBRIO Institute
Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University
Office: Hall for Discovery Learning and Research, Ste. 203
207 S. Martin Jischke Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907
laddb@purdue.edu