preLights in 2021

It’s been a busy year at preLights, with new preLighters joining, a new interview series, and a new Community Manager!

preLights posts

Up to the beginning of December, we’ve published over 200 new preLights posts in 2021. We’ve seen more posts on topics including Scientific Communication and Education and Ecology, as well as lots of highlights from our most popular categories Developmental Biology and Cell Biology.

The five most-viewed posts published in 2021 highlighted interesting new research across many different disciplines.

Hiral Shah and members of the Dey Lab highlighted a comprehensive review of the history of hypotheses around the single-celled ancestors of multicellularity  prelights.biologists.com/highlights/the-single-celled-ancestors-of-animals-a-history-of-hypotheses/

Guest preLighter Ricardo Henriques and postdoc in his lab, Mario del Rosario, wrote about a new innovation in expansion microscopy prelights.biologists.com/highlights/visualizing-cellular-and-tissue-ultrastructure-using-ten-fold-robust-expansion-microscopy-trex/

New preLighter Ashleigh Davey wrote about a novel technique for identifying RNA location in cells, which got a hugely positive response on Twitter prelights.biologists.com/highlights/analysis-of-subcellular-transcriptomes-by-rna-proximity-labeling-with-halo-seq/

Fabio highlighted a new technique in genomic engineering prelights.biologists.com/highlights/precise-genomic-deletions-using-paired-prime-editing/

And Marc wrote about made-to-order immunity in plants prelights.biologists.com/highlights/nlr-immune-receptor-nanobody-fusions-confer-plant-disease-resistance/.

We’re really excited to see interest across such diverse topics and hope to see more posts about innovative new approaches in 2022!

News & Interviews

This year we published interviews with more of our preLighters as part of our ‘Meet the preLighters’ series. It was great to feature some of the most active members of our community, many of whom are doing brilliant science communication and outreach work alongside their day-to-day research and writing for preLights. To highlight just a few, Joao talked about his translation work for Brazilian scientists, Sophia talked about diversity and representation in science, and Baheerathan talked about the importance of outreach and science communication in regional languages.

We also launched our new interview series ‘preLights talks to’, where we’ve spoken with scientists across the world about lots of different topics, Amongst these, Christopher Jackson spoke about the importance of accessibility and diversity in science, Amanda Haage talked about her experience as a new PI, and Sarvenaz Sarabipour spoke about early-career research culture.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to speak to us this year, and we look forward to featuring more interviews next year.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank our community of preLighters for the time they spend writing such great posts, and our preLights readers for their support on our website and on social media.