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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

How to “Run” embryonic development

Posted by , on 24 July 2019

The term “embryonic development” was originally proposed some 2,400 years ago by Aristotle, however, many aspects of how the genome regulates development remain unclear. One major challenge of the modern …

Embryonic hydraulics triumphs

Posted by , on 26 June 2019

In this article I share with you a more personal, chronological account of how our story unfolds (recently published in Nature), and highlight some key events and insights that help …

Beyond morphogen signaling

Posted by , on 25 June 2019

By Dörthe Jülich & Scott Holley   Organizers pattern surrounding tissues via secreted morphogens that specify different cell states as a function of concentration. Wolpert’s French Flag model is commonly …

Decoding light for developmental timing

Posted by , on 13 June 2019

Shruti Vemaraju¹ and Richard A. Lang¹-²  ¹Center for Chronobiology,¹The Visual Systems Group, Abrahamson Pediatric Eye Institute, Division of Pediatric Ophthalmology, ²Division of Developmental Biology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH …

Collaboration: All the things we cannot see (alone).

Posted by , on 3 June 2019

By Miriam Rosenberg and Suparna Ray Most of what we know about axial patterning in insects comes from decades of careful, beautiful work done in flies. Thanks to the genetic …

Notch awakens: transitioning to the first differentiation step

Posted by , on 3 May 2019

The story behind our recent paper in eLife.   In the mid-1900s, Conrad Hal Waddington introduced the idea of development as a series of branching decisions taken under the control …

Forces maintain order between cells

Posted by , on 30 April 2019

Written by Antoine Fruleux and Arezki Boudaoud As Lewis Wolpert put it (Wolpert, PLoS Biology 2010), if you extend your two arms, you will likely find that they match in …

Hot fish and the energetics of early development

Posted by , on 10 April 2019

The story behind our recent paper “Heat Oscillations Driven by the Embryonic Cell Cycle Reveal the Energetic Costs of Signaling” Developmental Cell, 48(5), pp.646–658.e6. At the end of 2014, a …

“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