the Node

Development, host of the Node, invites you to submit your latest research to our upcoming Special Issue – Human Development. The post Call for papers – Human Development appeared first on the Node .

How is it possible that cnidarians evolved so many different ways to acomplish the same thing? Unipolar and multipolar ingression, invagination, delamination, epiboly… All the paths lead to ‘planula’ – a torpedo bilayered swiming larva.The term is ‘equifinal development’ and it concerns interspecific and also intraespecific variations, which are quite common among cnidarians and sponges. [...] Th…

The recent deluge of Substack and Medium articles, promising strategies and frameworks to work effectively and to complete tasks with intentionality, would have some to believe that the ‘P’ in PhD stands for “productivity” and not Philosophy. As if these neatly bound systems are the golden recipe for delivering excellent work. Yet, this perfectly packaged lie is further from the truth than a PhD …

If you have been working with data science tools, Python, and R for a while, you know the struggle of working with multiple dependencies for each library/package. I recently found myself staring at a massive, cluttered work/ directory full of Nextflow environments. It felt like my system was groaning under the weight of gigabytes of [...] The post Migrating from Conda to Pixi: A cleaner and faste…

If you have ever tried to set up Git and GitHub, you have probably run into a wall of cryptic errors. I certainly did when I was setting it up for the first time! So, I thought I will share a quick guide on how to use Git/GitHub for maintaining reproducible analysis.In this guide, I [...] The post How to use Git/GitHub like a Pro? appeared first on the Node .

If you are a bioinformatician, you have probably come across this situation. You’re deep into a single-cell RNA sequencing analysis, preparing your object for downstream analysis. All that’s left is a simple metadata merge to bring in your clinical annotations. You run the join, check the output, and everything looks perfect, except for one stubborn [...] The post Bytes don’t lie: How a hidden sp…

Somewhere, there’s a paper that will not get written. Before there’s a scientific paper, someone has to be there to ask the right question, design the right experiment, watch it fail, and try again. What happens when that person never gets the chance? Maybe they never made it to the laboratory, or maybe staying there [...] The post The Experiments We Never Run appeared first on the Node .

Bioinformatics can seem intimidating, especially when you're just starting out. But you don't need to be an expert to begin exploring single-cell RNA-seq data. In this short tutorial, I walk through a simple four-step workflow using a publicly available dataset from the developing zebrafish heart: get the data, prepare it, visualize the cells, and ask a biological question. The post Show and Tell…

The International Symposium on Root Development (often referred to as the “Rooting” conference series) takes place every three years and unites developmental biology, agriculture, plant-pathogen interactions, and biotechnology – on plant roots!  After it had taken place in a monastery in Ghent in 2023, this year’s conference was held at the Riva Marina Resort in Specchiolla on the Adriatic coast …

It is summertime. I am eight years old and on summer break. I have been an early bird for as long as I can remember, and that morning I get out of bed at sunrise and run barefoot outside. I still vividly remember the smell of grass in the early morning and the chilly dew [...] The post Every seed mattered appeared first on the Node .

On 26 April, a sun-drenched country hotel in East Sussex set the stage for an intensive three-day workshop that brought together 30 leading metabolism researchers across cell biology, mitochondrial biology, developmental biology, cancer biology and systems biology. Organised by Lydia Finley and Wilhelm Palm, the meeting provided a forum for sharing unpublished findings, assessing the [...] The po…

With most first-year PhD students starting graduate programs this month, it seemed like a good time to address the most important dilemma faced by many incoming PhD students—how to choose rotation labs. Although perhaps obvious to those of us with some experience, many of the key factors are often overlooked by early career scientists. This [...] The post How to choose rotations and a dissertatio…

By: The FlyPower Team From July 27–28, 2026, the Institute of Biosciences at the University of São Paulo (IB-USP) hosted the FlyPower Meeting 2026, held as an official satellite event of the XXIII Congress of the Brazilian Society for Cell Biology (SBBC). Figure 1: FlyPower Meeting attendees at the Universidade de São Paulo. Bringing together [...] The post From Bench to Bedside: Highlights from …