About blebology.com

Who writes blebology.com and how to reach us, how to read the certainty labels and the ◆ mark for our own work, and how the pages are made.

blebology.com is a reference on cellular blebs for scientists who do not yet work on them: cell biologists, physicists, engineers, clinician-scientists and students entering the field. It explains how blebs form and what they do, states how certain each central claim is, and cites the papers behind it.

Who we are

The site is written by Juan Manuel García-Arcos, Group Leader and Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Ambizione Fellow at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), who leads the Cell Dynamics Lab (celldynamicslab.com), which studies blebs, membrane mechanics and amoeboid cell migration. Our background is in biophysics: a PhD at Institut Curie and Université de Paris, in the laboratory of Matthieu Piel, on how blebs of cancer cells are stabilized and how they move cells (García-Arcos, 2020 ◆), followed by postdoctoral work with Aurélien Roux at the University of Geneva that included a study of membrane tension gradients in adherent cells (García-Arcos et al., 2025 ◆).

Suggestions and corrections

We welcome suggestions and corrections by email to juan.garciaarcos@epfl.ch. To suggest a missing paper, send its reference (a DOI is enough) and, if you wish, a sentence on why it matters. To report a mistake, name the page and the sentence, and give the correct statement with its source. Accepted corrections are acknowledged, with their date, on the page they concern. The site lists its sources but does not host copies of the papers, for copyright reasons. Researchers who need a copy of a cited source for their own research can request one at the same address.

How to read the certainty labels

Central claims carry one of four labels, in italics after the claim. The labels describe the state of the published evidence, not our confidence or the odds that a claim will prove true. A claim is established when several independent studies support it and it is broadly accepted, and strongly supported when there is considerable evidence but important details remain unresolved. It is proposed when the evidence is limited or indirect, and an open question when the evidence cannot yet distinguish between plausible explanations. Qualifiers such as “in vitro” or “one laboratory” narrow a label to the systems that gave the evidence, and our own syntheses are introduced as ours (“in our reading”).

Diversity is not treated as disagreement. Different cells, or the same cells in different conditions, often reach a similar outcome by different routes: blebs start where the cortex tears in some systems and where the membrane comes away from an intact cortex in others (Physics of blebs). In such cases we say which system shows what. When studies of the same system genuinely disagree, we say so and discuss the likely reasons, such as cell type, geometry, method or timescale.

Our own work and the ◆ mark

Papers we wrote or co-wrote, from our own laboratory or with other groups, are marked ◆ wherever they are cited, in the text and at the start of their reference entry. They are held to the same standard of evidence as all other work, and where a line of research rests largely on our papers, the text says so. Frameworks from our own work, such as the division of blebbing into transient, circus and stable regimes (García-Arcos et al., 2024a ◆), are presented as proposals. Papers by close collaborators are not marked, because co-authorship can be checked objectively, while closeness would need a judgment for every paper. Our papers are not among the central papers of the Milestones, except on the page on cell fragmentation (M17), where they are part of the primary evidence. Wherever a preprint has been published, we cite the published version.

How the pages are made

The pages rest on a systematic review of the bleb literature, whose methods and limits are described on the Meta-review page; the papers it found are in the paper lists. Phrases such as “the earliest we found” mean the earliest among the publications we read, not necessarily the first ever. Language models assisted with searching, sorting, reading, note-taking, checking and drafting, under written rules. Every factual sentence cites a paper that was read, and each page is checked claim by claim against the source texts, also with a language model, before we review it for publication. References mark preprints with preprint and sources we could read only as abstracts with abstract only. Figures from published papers are shown with their source for educational and non-profit use. Our own figures come from our figshare deposits (CC BY 4.0), our plots are generated by code from the paper lists, and our schematics are drawn for the site.

References (3)

• ◆ García-Arcos JM (2020) Stabilization and motility mechanism of blebs in cancer cells. PhD thesis, Université de Paris (Institut Curie). doi:10.70675/a35575c7z85b5z4ad1z98acz50f8d65ebbac
• ◆ García-Arcos JM, Jha A, Waterman CM et al. (2024a) Blebology: principles of bleb-based migration. Trends Cell Biol 34:838–853. doi:10.1016/j.tcb.2024.02.009
• ◆ García-Arcos JM, Mehidi A, Sanchez-Velasquez J et al. (2025) Adherent cells sustain membrane tension gradients independently of migration. Nat Commun 16:10539. doi:10.1038/s41467-025-65571-9