Behind the paper stories
Every paper has a story behind it, and we regularly commission scientists to tell theirs. In this collection you’ll discover the highs and the lows, the chance encounters and life changing discoveries from the breadth of developmental biology and stem cell research.
Recent posts
Postnatal neurodevelopment: Inside out or the reverse?
Posted by Xuanmao Chen, on 12 March 2025
The people behind the papers – Juan Yang and Xuanmao Chen In mammalian embryos, brains develop from the inside out, with younger neurons moving to the outer layers in a …Fish, Frogs, Friends, Lend me your Ears.
Posted by Mathi Thiruppathy, on 6 March 2025
Humans and other tetrapods evolved from aquatic fish. In making this leap, tetrapods evolved lungs to breathe air and lost respiratory gills. It is tempting to intuit that lungs evolved …The Arterial Maze: Unveiling the Origin of Pial Collaterals in Mouse Brain
Posted by Swarnadip Ghosh, on 19 February 2025
Written by Swarnadip Ghosh & Soumyashree Das Behind the Paper Story of “Development of pial collaterals by extension of pre-existing artery tips” What we do and how we do it? …Orphan nuclear receptors: individual and collective roles in mouse development
Posted by Nicola_Festuccia, on 10 February 2025
The elusive importance of NR5A2 and ESRRB as pluripotency factors Our paper entitled “Nr5a2 is dispensable for zygotic genome activation but essential for morula development” is the culmination of a …Deforming Nuclei: a way to move through the crowd!
Posted by Mariana Maia-Gil, on 3 February 2025
In their recent paper, Maia-Gil and colleagues explored whether and how nuclear properties can influence nuclear positioning in vivo. Their work revealed that in the densely packed retinal zebrafish neuroepithelium, …Divide and conquer. Or don’t divide but still conquer.
Posted by Kalki Kukreja, on 25 January 2025
Behind the paper story for “Cell state transitions are decoupled from cell division during early embryo development“ As embryos develop, their cells perform two fundamental tasks: they divide to populate …Tiny titans: fantastic worms and their powerful regenerative abilities
Posted by Rannyele Passos Ribeiro, on 19 January 2025
In their paper recently published in Evolution & Development, Vanessa Spieß, Rannyele P. Ribeiro and colleagues explore the regenerative abilities of the marine segmented worm Syllis malaquini. Their research reveals …Behind the paper: “Recording morphogen signals reveals origins of gastruloid symmetry breaking”
Posted by Harry McNamara, on 17 January 2025
Stem cell models as laboratories to study self-organization My road from physics to developmental biology began in a journal club during my PhD in Adam Cohen’s lab at Harvard. We …
“If you notice something unusual in your experiments, don’t just throw it away!”
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Our full archive going back to 2010 is filterable by category, tag and date.