preLights

🚨 Call for preLighters!🚨 Help us highlight the most exciting biological preprints. Share your insights, build your profile, and be part of a supportive community! 🌍 Interested? Apply today & help shape the future of science publishing! 📢 More info: prelights.biologists.com/news/join-the-…

Crossover: hanging by a COSA-2 thread Chee Kiang Ewe highlights work from Celja J. Uebel & colleagues demonstrating the complex molecular machinery required to maintain the fidelity of meiotic recombination. #preprint #DevBio #preLight ⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/dis…

🧵 New paper alert! Today on bioRxiv, we show how a microtubule (MT) associated protein, MTCL1, links 2 regulatory layers: mechanical MT stabilization and writing of then tubulin code. A multi-lab effort driven by @Juanmabertoldi1 and Julie Dang spanning atoms to organisms. 1/n

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_MSB #preprint #zoology #preLight ⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/dri…

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 nature.com/articles/d4158… Kudos to @rust_ruslan for leading this project👍 biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

Chromosome loss is detrimental to cellular fitness, yet can be an early event in cancer. How can a deleterious genomic alteration initiate tumorigenesis? 🤔 Our latest preprint tackles this paradox using clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) as a model. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

preLights in developmental biology (June 2026) Explore recent preLight Explore recent @preLights posts discussing preprints in developmental and stem cell biology. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/15… #DevBio #StemCell #Preprint

New preprint! Do all kinase domains have similar activation mechanisms? We steer AlphaFold2 using "transfer seeding" of known kinases to sample 8.3 ms of MD simulations via Folding@home. We find that the pathways are different and kinase-specific! Link: doi.org/10.64898/2026.…

Excited to share our new preprint from @RutterLab, identifying a melanosomal tyrosine transporter! biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

Our new preprint @biorxivpreprint, led by @katsu_s_minami et al.! 🎉🧬🔬 biorxiv.org/content/10.648… Machine learning-assisted Repli-Histo labeling and single-nucleosome imaging reveal distinct transcription-dependent chromatin constraints across euchromatin and heterochromatin.

Happy to share our new preprint from @RutterLab. To understand how genes are controlled, we developed a method we call TRoUT-FISH, using CRISPR + RNA-FISH. We found that glycolytic gene expression is fine-tuned by lineage specifying transcription factors. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

What #preprints have been generating excitement in nuclear cell biology? As part of the latest Special Issue in @J_Cell_Sci, this article bundles together relevant #preLights. preLighters involved include Pierre, Abby, Reinier, @NathSristilekha & Filipe journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/13…

I am really happy to share a new preprint from our lab on cardiac repair! To dissect how immune-ECM-cardiomyocyte interactions lead to cardiac repair, we established a modular human cardioid injury platform. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

Mammalian embryogenesis combines robustness and flexibility. @BBuilhe & Lucie Hermet cover work from @LukeKoblan, @WilliamNColgan & colleagues @JswLab. #preprint #DevBio #genetics #genomics Check out the #preLight 👀⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/com…

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 & @berteroale #preLight 👀⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/com…

Annual killifish make neutrophils before almost every other cell type, even before gastrulation. Neutrophils usually arise from the lateral plate mesoderm (forming in cyan), but in killifish they are already patrolling around the embryo in gold. tinyurl.com/killiphil

Very interesting new preprint from @jengreitz lab arguing that rather than there being significant enhancer-promoter compatibility, promoters simply differ in their enhancer responsiveness. If promoters are responsive, they respond to all enhancers. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

Cell atlases are becoming coordinate systems for biology. Excited to share our latest preprint from the Human Cell Atlas Pancreas Bionetwork. 🎉🧬 We set out to build a healthy reference framework that allows us to interpret pancreatic disease, compare experimental models, and benchmark regenerative approaches within a common coordinate system. This work brings together more than 2 million pancreatic transcriptomes analyzed within a single framework, including: 🔹 815,126 healthy single cell and single nucleus transcriptomes 🔹 109 healthy donors 🔹 12 independent studies 🔹 94 harmonized cell types and transcriptional states And extending this healthy reference to: 🔹 1,018,479 transcriptomes from 261 donors spanning diabetes, pancreatic cancer, and stem cell derived islets 🔹 193,435 mouse endocrine cells for quantitative benchmarking of disease models Some highlights: 🧩 A unified healthy reference that captures cellular diversity across donors, technologies, and biological variation. 🔬 Identification and multimodal support for a putative rare polyhormonal endocrine state, providing a candidate population for future investigation. 📍 Diabetes associated endocrine cells are best understood as remodeling within healthy cellular state space rather than as entirely new cell identities. 🎯 Distinct injury associated and malignancy associated epithelial ecosystem regions emerge when pancreatic cancer is viewed relative to the healthy reference. 🧪 Quantitative benchmarking of mouse diabetes models and stem cell derived islets against adult human pancreatic reference states. More broadly, I believe this illustrates where the field is heading. Reference atlases are evolving from static cell catalogs into analytical frameworks. They provide a common coordinate system for interpreting disease biology, comparing experimental models, and ultimately accelerating translation into medicine. Congratulations to Shrey Parikh, Daniel Strobl, Malte Luecken, Diego Balboa, the Human Cell Atlas Pancreas Bionetwork, and all collaborators on this outstanding team effort. It has been a privilege to be part of this journey. Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… #HumanCellAtlas #SingleCell #Diabetes

Marta San Martin highlights work that identifies defective BRCA1-dependent DNA end resection as a key driver of tandem duplication formation & FANCM synthetic lethality. #preprint Namrata M. Nilavar, @AlbertoMarinG1 et al. #ScullyLab #MolBio #preLight⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/def…

📢Check out our latest preprint list on FocalPlane In this list, we focus on the latest tools and techniques in imaging, including sample prep, probes, hardware and software. focalplane.biologists.com/2026/06/26/mic… Let us know if you've been reading a preprint that we should add to our list.

Our latest preprint is now on bioRxiv! We developed Apical3DTip, a new tool to quantify 3D cell shape from live images. It measures cell shape, division planes, and daughter-cell volumes, with broader use for morphometrics. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…