One of the joys of posting a preprint is seeing that people are viewing, downloading and (hopefully) reading your paper. On bioRxiv you can check out the statistics for your paper in the metrics tab. We posted a preprint recently and it clocked up over 1,000 views in the first day or so. This made me wonder: is that a lot of views or not? How does it compare to other preprints in our category?

The Washington DC Walter E. Washington Convention Center was the venue for the recent Cell Bio 2022 Meeting that took place on 3-7 December 2022.  Cell Bio 2022, the joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), is the largest yearly gathering for the Cell Biology community.

Here is a summary of the info I gleaned from asking for recommendations for the best human cell line. These were my criteria: For context, we currently use a number of human cell lines in the lab: HeLa, RPE1, HCT116, SKOV3; as well as many others in the past: HEK293, DLD-1, U2OS. I consider HeLa to be the almost perfect cell line.

The 12th international meeting on Visualizing Biological Data took place on March 16–18, 2022 (AKA VIZBI 2022). This conference is always a visual treat, and with its focus on transforming how Life Scientists view data from Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biomedical Science this year’s event was no exception.

Quantifying the degree of colocalisation of two signals in microscopy images is very tricky. Lots has been written on this topic, including in my book The Digital Cell. The focus of this post is on visualising colocalisation . One way to look at colocalisation is two think about two sets of objects and how many of each set overlap. This is sometimes referred to as co-occupancy or object-based colocalisation .

A new paper means a new paper explainer. This post is all about our new paper on clathrin assembly. Some background info Endocytosis is the way that cells take up material from the outside world. The cell can make tiny vesicles that bud inwards from the cell surface and pinch off to travel inside the cell. This process is important for lots of things that cells do, so there is a lot of interest in how endocytosis works.

Cell Bio 2020 Virtual – the online ASCB|EMBO Meeting – took place on 2-16 December 2020 and offered many invaluable insights on the structural and evolutionary basis of biological systems.

The Human Cell Atlas is a consortium that aims to “create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.” I first met with consortium members of the Human Cell Atlas at the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program Common Coordinates Framework Workshop based at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA in December 2017.

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC was the venue for this year’s ASCB|EMBO 2019 Meeting that took place on 7-11 December 2019. The American Society of Cell Biology conference, now merged with the EMBO meeting, is the largest yearly gathering for the cell imaging community, and GigaScience has attended in the past.

I wrote a short opinion piece for the December Newsletter for the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The content is reproduced below, or you can read the newsletter version here on page 14 of the PDF. The theme of this year’s ASCB|EMBO Meeting is Cell Biology for the 21st Century. So what skills are essential for a cell biologist to master in the 21st century?