The community site for and by
developmental and stem cell biologists

Behind the paper stories

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

Orphan nuclear receptors: individual and collective roles in mouse development

Posted by , 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 , 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 , 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 , 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 , 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 …

Winding road to the cambial stem cells

Posted by , on 13 January 2025

In plants, the vascular cambium, a bifacial stem cell niche, drives wood formation by generating the xylem on one side and the phloem on the other. In this post, Ari …

Behind the paper: “Temporal variability and cell mechanics control robustness in mammalian embryogenesis”

Posted by , on 15 December 2024

The massive presence of disorder and variability challenges the traditional metaphor of the developmental process as a perfectly executed program leading to precise mechanisms at every level [1,2]. Yet, the …

Don’t eat me!!

Posted by , on 15 November 2024

When I joined the Zon lab in June 2021, my mentor, Leonard Zon, shared an insightful piece of advice: “A good project always has two questions, one you can answer …

“If you notice something unusual in your experiments, don’t just throw it away!”

Read Laura Pellegrini’s piece on choroid plexus organoids 

Do you have a story to tell? We can give comments on drafts and any level of editing you want, and we particularly encourage contributions from researchers for whom English is not their first language.

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Our full archive going back to 2010 is filterable by category, tag and date.

Updated on 21 August 2024