22nd February 2021

    After months of preparation, which included discussing ideas with researchers, building and testing the website, and recruiting the first group of preLighters, The Company of Biologists launched preLights on 20 February 2018, with 28 highlights on the site. Three years and over a thousand preLight posts later, we are pleased with how this[…]

28th January 2021

The preLights team will be in control of the next webinar in the Development presents… series (run by the journal Development). Three preLighters with interests in developmental biology – Sundar Naganathan, Irepan Salvador-Martinez and Grace Lim – have each invited authors of recent exciting preprints to give talks. The preLighters will chair the talks and the[…]

18th January 2021

Pavithran Ravindran has been a part of the preLights team for two years, and has highlighted many interesting preprints in synthetic biology and beyond (for a full list click here). In fact, in 2019 one of his highlights became our most-read post of the year. Pav was recently first author on a preprint so we[…]

1st January 2021

Looking back at 2020, we have a lot to thank our preLighter community and our readers! It was our busiest year since launch with 434 preLight posts, and we were thrilled that 251 of them contained an author’s response. The preLighters were also busy with projects related to COVID-19 preprints, and we posted several interviews[…]

8th December 2020

Sundar Naganathan is a postdoc at EPFL Lausanne in the lab of Prof Andrew Oates. Here, he studies the biophysical mechanisms of symmetry establishment using zebrafish. We caught up with Sundar to discuss his research, scientific career, and his community activities which involve being a preLighter.       Let’s go a bit back in[…]

13th October 2020

By Zhang-He Goh, Jonny Coates, Hugo Gruson Cross-posted with rOpenSci   At the eLife Sprint in September 2020, we revamped the covidpreprints.com website, which aims at featuring landmark preprints on a timeline of the pandemic. The birth of the project The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led to about 35 million confirmed cases and over a[…]