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
Temporal cascades and neuronal lineages: an interview with Jocelyn Tang and Alex Donovan
Posted by the Node, on 3 November 2026
We speak with co-first authors Jocelyn Tang and Alex Donovan, who show that temporal cascades are conserved in different neuronal lineages of flies.How do sea anemones make babies?
Posted by Stefanie Williams, on 24 October 2026
Stefanie Williams looks back at her sources of inspiration and hurdles she overcame for her second PhD research paper to come to fruition.ULT1 and me
Posted by Vangeli Geshkovski, on 3 September 2026
How I started working on ULTRAPETALA1, the subject of a recent paper revealing how it influences plant development.From killing cells to shaping them: enigma of Caspase-3 beyond apoptosis
Posted by Saurabh chand Sagar, on 1 September 2026
Small historic background: In an era when caspases are known as killer proteins, Drosophila Malpighian tubules state otherwise. Drosophila is a holometabolous insect, meaning that it goes through three life …From comparison to mechanism: decoding heart regeneration
Posted by Shih-Lei (Ben) Lai, on 26 May 2026
In this Behind the paper story, Ben Lai tells us about a question that followed him for more than a decade.The signal that got through
Posted by Maxwell Wilson, on 24 April 2026
Although Marianne and I first met at the Aspen Center for Physics, USA, in the summer of 2022, our scientific careers had, in a sense, been pre-slated to converge.From fate to form: the journey to whole-embryo spatial transcriptomics
Posted by Yinan Wan, on 2 April 2026
Yinan Wan shares the inside story of an ambitious journey to whole-embryo spatial transcriptomics.Behind the paper: “Spatially organized cellular communities shape functional tissue architecture in the pancreas”
Posted by Alejo Torres Cano, on 28 January 2026
Alejo Torres Cano’s story on their recent paper describing how spatially organized cellular communities shape…
“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.