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
Monotreme ears and the evolution of mammal jaws
Posted by nanthwal, on 5 August 2020
Jaw joints, in most vertebrate animals that have them, form between a bone in the head called the quadrate and one in the mandible called the articular. The mandibles (lower …Building plant weapons
Posted by Vivian Irish, on 27 July 2020
By Fei Zhang and Vivian F. Irish Flowering plants, from giant sequoias to miniscule duckweed, all depend on the action of small populations of cells, called meristems, to grow. Meristems …Retracting sheaths and words
Posted by Alexandria Hughes, on 17 July 2020
My mentor, Bruce Appel, emphasizes the importance of communicating science clearly and precisely. Consequently, I have watched my peers and myself deliver ever-improving talks, posters, and manuscripts during our time …Phase separation mediated Par complex cluster formation in cell polarity
Posted by YingYang, on 13 July 2020
Ziheng Liu and Ying Yang The asymmetry in cell morphology and the asymmetric distribution of intracellular organelles, proteins, nucleic acids and other components are the hallmarks of cellular polarity, possessed …Introducing ACME: the species-versatile fixation and dissociation solution for single cell analysis
Posted by nathankenny, on 1 July 2020
This post highlights the approach and findings of a new research article available in preprint on BioRxiv. This feature was written by members of the Solana lab, authors of that …Now we need arrest… A long journey into the end-of-flowering
Posted by Tom Bennett, on 29 June 2020
By Tom Bennett & Catriona Walker 25th May 2020: Publication TB: The joy of seeing an article finally published is always slightly tempered by the long-drawn out process of …Conversations with my parents (about adult chondrogenesis and spontaneous cartilage repair in the skate, Leucoraja erinacea)
Posted by andrewgillis, on 23 June 2020
One night, during the summer of 2012, I found myself sitting in a cottage in Woods Hole, trying to explain to my parents why I’d spent much of my professional …The story of my heart, from the bottom of my heart (says the Zebrafish)
Posted by PRAGYA SIDHWANI, on 23 June 2020
I started off as quite little—just one cell, in fact. No heart, no brain, no blood flowed in me and yet, somehow I found the motivation in me to divide. …
“If you notice something unusual in your experiments, don’t just throw it away!”
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.