Better late than never! Last month, we posted our preprint on single-cell RNA sequencing of the #zebrafish sox17 lineage — a collaboration among several labs including us, @stefanmaterna.bsky.social and @thelovelylab.bsky.social. A few key takeaways below: 1/3 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Transcriptional divergence of the zebrafish sox17 lineage begins during gastrulation

The endoderm is specified at the onset of gastrulation and subsequently undergoes extensive migration before forming an epithelial sheet that gives rise to multiple organs, including the gut and respi...

biorxiv.org

Lipids build the membranes of all cells, but identifying their precise functions is extremely challenging. Here’s our attempt to change that: How to find and understand lipid-protein interactions, by Katelyn Cook & company. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

RNA-seq tells us how much RNA is present in the cell. But to understand gene regulation, we need to easily measure the synthesis and decay rates driving this abundance. We introduce AIR-seq: analog intrinsic recoding sequencing. (1/6) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Analog intrinsic recoding measures RNA dynamics without chemical conversion

Steady-state RNA abundance measurements mask the synthesis and decay rates that shape gene expression. Analog intrinsic recoding sequencing (AIR-seq) repurposes the base-pairing properties of N4-hydro...

biorxiv.org

Excellent first post from Ben, highlighting a #preprint from @htstuart.bsky.social & colleagues @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social #TanakaLab #DevBio Check out the #preLight ⬇️👀

Benjamin Swedlund@benswedlund.bsky.social · last wk.

Check out my first preprint highlight with @prelights.bsky.social! How cells read the room - coordinated symmetry breaking and proportional cell fate allocation in neural organoids, from Hannah T Stuart et al. Lovely story with solid back-and-forth between modelling and perturbative experiments.

Check out my first preprint highlight with @prelights.bsky.social! How cells read the room - coordinated symmetry breaking and proportional cell fate allocation in neural organoids, from Hannah T Stuart et al. Lovely story with solid back-and-forth between modelling and perturbative experiments.

Minimal essential requirements for neural tube self-organisation - preLights

How cells read the room - coordinated symmetry breaking and proportional cell fate allocation in neural organoids

prelights.biologists.com

Happy to share the first preprint out of the Nomburg lab! Many aspects of cellular immunity are shared across the tree of life. Here, we show that some of these conserved aspects of cellular immunity are mirrored by conserved effectors of immune antagonism. Thread below! 1/15

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 2w ago

Conserved folds enable immune antagonism across the tree of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.21.739742v1

📝 NEW PREPRINT It’s with an immense joy that our preprint is finally out and it’s my first first co-author paper!!! 🧬🍄 What is the diversity of 3D genome architectures in fungi? We reconstructed the 3D genome architecture of public Hi-C data from 55 fungal. Preprint: lnkd.in/enxTh2Cm

An innovative solution to nanoparticle drug delivery 💊 Bin Pan & colleagues demonstrate the safety & efficacy of adiposomes for targeted delivery of hydrophobic drugs for anti-cancer treatment #preprint #Nanomedicine #preLight by @elizabethpyman.bsky.social prelights.biologists.com/highlights/n...

Nature-Inspired Nanoparticle Adiposomes Enable Targeted Delivery of Hydrophobic Drug for Anti-Cancer Treatment - preLights

An innovative solution to nanoparticle drug delivery

prelights.biologists.com

Thrilled to share our collab led by Grace Hibshman with the Shipman lab! Type IX retron-Kva2 structure reveals phage detection via an HTH fold, not a primary sequence. We computationally designed triggers that program bacteria cell death, pointing toward designer antimicrobials.

We developed a new approach for mapping absolute membrane voltage, based on dynamic photocycle control in Voltron2. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Here's my favorite example: human iPSC colonies break into electrical domains as they begin to differentiate.

I'm excited to announce a new preprint from the lab just posted to bioRxiv: “Retrograde trafficking inhibitors allosterically trap Get3 to block tail-anchored protein biogenesis.” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We're excited to present a single-cell atlas of vertebrate cranial motor neuron development, the first story from my postdoctoral work in the Moens lab, up now on bioRxiv!

Crossover: hanging by a COSA-2 thread @ethanewe.bsky.social highlights work from @celjauebel.bsky.social & colleagues demonstrating the complex molecular machinery required to maintain the fidelity of meiotic recombination. #preprint #DevBio #preLight ⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/d...

Disordered protein COSA-2 maintains crossover-specific repair compartments to ensure meiotic crossover maturation - preLights

Crossover: hanging by a COSA-2 thread

prelights.biologists.com

📣 Tracking cells through time – including divisions – is a core problem in live-imaging microscopy. We built HOCT, an edge-centric Transformer that hits state-of-the-art on the Cell Tracking Challenge without a pretrained image encoder. Work led by @jookuma.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2607.11754 🧪🔬💻

Do spectacular feather colours always evolve through selection? In island kingfishers, genetic drift may have a bigger role to play! Zoha Sadaqat covers work from Jenna McCullough & team @unm.edu #preprint #zoology #preLight ⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/d...

Drift drives phenotypic evolution in a rapid island radiation - preLights

Do spectacular feather colors always evolve through selection? In island kingfishers, genetic drift may have a bigger role to play!

prelights.biologists.com

Nature News covered our preprint on LLM analysis of Preprint-to-Publication transition 😆👇 Think preprints are unreliable? Analysis of 70,000 studies might change your mind www.nature.com/articles/d41... Kudos to @rrust.bsky.social for leading this project👍 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fresh out of the lab! Our new preprint is now up on BioRxiv, exploring how the beneficial bacterium Pseudomonas putida controls its T6SS nanoweapon. It turns out the Gac/Rsm pathway acts as a strict molecular brake on the system. 👇 (1/4) Read the full preprint here: doi.org/10.64898/202...

At the #SynSci2026 meeting in Glasgow for a dedicated #ECR event. Ran into Filipe Nunes Vicente - always such a pleasure to bump into #preLighters at scientific meetings #community If anyone (attending this meeting) is interested in joining us, please ask me about @prelights.bsky.social #preprints

preLights in developmental biology (June 2026) Explore recent preLight @prelights.bsky.social posts discussing preprints in developmental and stem cell biology. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/... #DevBio #StemCell #Preprint

This was a fun manuscript, even as a preprint, long before its publication 🙂 Back then, I wrote a preLight (@prelights.bsky.social) on it doi.org/10.1242/prel...

Frictiotaxis underlies adhesion-independent durotaxis - preLights

These cells are made for walking, up a friction-gradient they move, One of these days these cells are gonna crawl away from you

doi.org

🌾 Every grass leaf shares the same repeating short-long cell pattern in its epidermis. Our new #preprint identifies the protein that builds it. 🔬🧬 📄 preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵⬇️ 1/11

New preprint 📢 Thrilled to share our long-awaited work on the role of RSX in marsupial X-inactivation. This was a huge team effort over the years, led by @aureliencourtois.bsky.social @sermenchero.bsky.social Sugako Ogushi and Waz Varsally, that allowed us to set up genome editing in opossum embryos

Genome editing of marsupial RSX reveals conserved and divergent principles in mammalian X-inactivation

X-chromosome inactivation balances X-gene dosage between the sexes in eutherians and marsupials. The lncRNA Xist mediates X-inactivation in eutherians but is absent from marsupials. An evolutionarily ...

biorxiv.org

Our new preprint @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social, led by @katsuminami.bsky.social‬ et al.! 🎉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Machine learning-assisted Repli-Histo labeling and single-nucleosome imaging reveal distinct transcription-dependent chromatin constraints across euchromatin and heterochromatin.

Exciting #preprints in nuclear cell biology. As part of the latest Special Issue in @jcellsci.bsky.social, this article bundles together relevant #preLights. preLighters involved include @pierrecaron.bsky.social, Abby, Reinier @sristi.bsky.social & Filipe journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Preprint highlights in nuclear cell biology

This article features recent preLights that discuss preprints relevant to this ‘Cell Biology of the Nucleus’ special issue.preLighterPierre Caron, CNRS researcher at the Institute of Structural Biolog...

journals.biologists.com

🚨 New Preprint! 🚨: A new method for quantifying #tissue #clearing and a next-get #lightsheet #Microscope - the #mesoSPIM ultra by Marko Pende, @jcregg.bsky.social, @murawalalab.bsky.social @mdibl.org & many more! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Github: github.com/mesoSPIM/mes...

New preprint from the group, comparing CRISPRko and CRISPRi via a Perturb-seq readout: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Direct comparison of CRISPR knockout and interference with Perturb-seq

CRISPR knockout (CRISPRko) and CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) are two workhorse technologies for loss-of-function studies, yet direct comparisons between the two are scant relative to their widespread ...

biorxiv.org

Mammalian embryogenesis combines robustness and flexibility. @berylbiologist.bsky.social & Lucie Hermet cover work from @lukekoblan.bsky.social, William Colgan & colleagues @jswlab.bsky.social. #preprint #DevBio #genetics #genomics Check out the #preLight 👀⬇️

Béryl Laplace-Builhé Aka biologiste antique@berylbiologist.bsky.social · last mo.

Excited to share our first @prelights.bsky.social with Lucie Hermet!🤩 We highlight the beautiful work of William N. Colgan et al. using PEtracer to map cell fate decisions during mouse embryogenesis, linking lineage history, transcriptional identity and spatial context. #DevBio #PreLights

Activating and repressing in the same cell: the dream came true in human induced pluripotent stem cells. Highlight prepared at the PEPR Cell-ID meeting. Includes an insightful response from #preprint authors Elisa Balmas & @berterolab.bsky.social #preLight⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/c...

Combinatorial and Inducible CRISPRa/i Enables Canalized hiPSC Forward Programming and Iterative Refinement via Single-Cell Genomics - preLights

Activating and repressing in the same cell: the dream came true in human induced pluripotent stem cells.

prelights.biologists.com

1/ Excited to share our new bioRxiv preprint! "4D spatial transcriptomics reveals nodule identity emerges through stacked parallel developmental programs" 📄 doi.org/10.64898/202... Using Xenium, we generated a 4D (3D space + time) atlas of nodule development in Medicago truncatula.