Coming Soon: The Digital Cell

Long-time readers might remember the short-lived series on quantixed called The Digital Cell. There is a reason why I stopped these posts, which I can now reveal… The Digital Cell will soon be a book! Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, The Digital Cell is a handbook to help cell and developmental biologists get to […]

Tips from the blog XI: Overleaf

I was recently an external examiner for a PhD viva in Cambridge. As we were wrapping up, I asked “if you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?”. It’s one of my stock questions and normally the candidate says “oh I’d do it so much quicker!” or something similar. However, this time I […]

The Digital Cell: Workflow

The future of cell biology, even for small labs, is quantitative and computational. What does this mean and what should it look like? My group is not there yet, but in this post I’ll describe where we are heading. The graphic below shows my current view of the ideal workflow for my lab. The graphic is pretty self-explanatory, but […]

Zero Tolerance

We were asked to write a Preview piece for Developmental Cell. Two interesting papers which deal with the insertion of amphipathic helices in membranes to influence membrane curvature during endocytosis were scheduled for publication and the journal wanted some “front matter” to promote them. Our Preview is paywalled – sorry about that – but I […]

Into The Great Wide Open

We have a new paper out! You can read it here. I thought I would write a post on how this paper came to be and also about our first proper experience with preprinting. Title of the paper: Non-specificity of Pitstop 2 in clathrin-mediated endocytosis. In a nutshell: we show that Pitstop 2, a supposedly selective clathrin […]

So Long

How long does it take to publish a paper? I posted the picture below on Twitter to show how long it takes for us to publish a paper. The answer is 235 days. This is the median time from submission at the first journal to publication online or in print. The data are from our […]