James Briscoe

His Royal Highness Prince William is talking with Edith Heard, who is to his left, inside a well-lit building entrance. They are both smiling and walking towards the camera.

His Royal Highness Prince William Is sitting at a round table with a group of students. They are all wearing safety glasses, and he is holding a pipette. There is a variety of scientific instruments in the middle of the table.

His Royal Highness Prince William is sitting in front of a microscope wearing a lab coat. He is laughing while looking towards someone to his left, also in a lab coat. They are both inside a large white room.

His Royal Highness Prince William stands next two Edith heard, both with arms folded across their front. He is facing and talking to three other people inside a well-lit building entrance.

Thanks to His Royal Highness Prince William for visiting the Crick today to explore how education, research and innovation are helping to deliver benefits in the UK and across the world – from antimicrobial resistance to the biology underlying our mental health.

🔗 www.crick.ac.uk/news/2026-02...

James Briscoe Editor-in-Chief , Development The Francis Crick Institute, UK “Community journals such as Development play a crucial role. Every issue of Development has papers handled by academic editors who are leaders in the field, so it offers a curated collection of the latest developmental biology research selected by experts.” Key topics: cell fate control and differentiation computational biology and modelling gene regulation and stem cells neural development and patterning tissue engineering and organoids

Our Editor-in-Chief, @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social, will be speaking at 2nd Meeting on Early Embryogenesis and Epigenetics at @molgen.mpg.de from Monday 16 February.

Please speak to James about publishing your research in Development.

journals.biologists.com/dev/pages/aims

Very sad news. Gail Martin (1944-2026) was a figure in developmental biology. She pioneered the field of ES cells.
A great colleague, a friend and a lovely person.

For International Day of Women and Girls in Science, #IDWGS2026, we are featuring some of our 'Transitions in development' interviewees from the past year.

Browse our full series here: journals.biologists.com/dev/collecti...

Professorship awarded to Mina Gouti Mina Gouti has been awarded a professorship at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The appointment will strengthen her pioneering organoid research at the Max Delbrück Center and deepen collaboratio...

Congratulations to Mina Gouti on her promotion to Professor

www.mdc-berlin.de/news/news/pr...

Our new paper: Entropy Sorting Feature Selection (ESFS)

A computational framework for gene selection from single cell data that extracts biological signals in noisy data while avoiding artefacts from conventional dimensionality reduction

A thread
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fill out our community survey to help shape the future of JCS Journal of Cell Science logo Line drawing of a group of people with speech bubbles above their heads

After 15 years as Editor-in-chief (EiC), Michael Way @drmichaelway.bsky.social will be stepping down at the end of 2026 & we are seeking feedback from the cell biology community as part of the consultation process for appointing a new EiC.
We'd love to hear from you: www.surveymonkey.com/r/GZCC9F9

GitHub - aradley/ESFS: ESFS is an Entropy Sorting based feature selection package primarily developed for feature selection of single cell RNA sequencing datasets. ESFS is an Entropy Sorting based feature selection package primarily developed for feature selection of single cell RNA sequencing datasets. - aradley/ESFS

ESFS is available as open-source packages for both CPU and GPU
github.com/aradley/ESFS

All credit to Arthur Radley who led the project, supported by Giulia Boezio, Cameron Shand, & Ruben Perez-Carrasco

4. Neural tube development: ESFS disentangled three overlapping regulatory programmes (spatial, temporal, neurogenesis) and identified superior marker genes

3. Glioblastoma tumour spatial data (15 heterogeneous samples): ESFS identified global, shared & tumour specific expression programmes in a single workflow, no manual sample-by-sample annotation needed

2. Colon spatial transcriptomics: ESFS resolved Serosa–LP–IEC stratification throughout the entire proximal-distal axis and uncovered gene expression gradients that consensus NMF analysis had missed

We tested ESFS in 4 challenging datasets

1. Early human embryo development from 8 independent studies. Without any batch integration, ESFS revealed coherent developmental trajectories & identified previously uncharacterised trophectoderm subpopulations

The framework comprises three algorithms

ES-GSS separates technical noise from biological signals

ES-CCF identifies cell groupings that maximise correlation with individual genes

ES-FMG identifies minimal marker gene sets capturing distinct expression programmes without redundancy

ESFS uses information-theoretic measures to identify multivariate gene relationships directly in gene expression space, not in latent space

By reformulating conditional entropy as a sorting problem, it achieves tractable feature correlation quantification with built-in significance testing

The problem: HVG selection shows poor reproducibility across implementations and introduces systematic biases that affect downstream analyses

Yet while other analytical steps get sophisticated new tools, feature selection has been largely neglected

Single-cell RNA-seq has revolutionised biology, but little attention has been paid to the first step in the analysis: feature selection

We've seen huge advances in clustering & integration, but highly variable genes (HVG) is still the method used to start most analyses

Our new paper: Entropy Sorting Feature Selection (ESFS)

A computational framework for gene selection from single cell data that extracts biological signals in noisy data while avoiding artefacts from conventional dimensionality reduction

A thread
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I watched much of Ian Chapman's (Head of @ukri.org) appearance this morning at @ukparliament.parliament.uk Science, Innovation and Technology Committee..

A few points and new information that bioscientists may find interesting...

A 🧵

Work for us Working for us We’re always looking for talented and motivated people to work as part of our close-knit team. Roles range from editorial to production, marketing to event co-ordination, HR to accounts...

We're hiring! JCS is looking for a Reviews Editor to join the team. This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who loves cell biology and wants to stay connected with the field (and be part of an organisation that believes in supporting the community).
www.biologists.com/about-us/wor...

Our latest: A gene selection method for single-cell RNA-seq that identifies developmental & spatial patterns missed by other analysis pipelines

ESFS: A Noise-Resilient Framework for Feature Selection and Marker Gene Discovery in Single-Cell Transcriptomics | bioRxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Looking forward to
the St. Anna CCRI Symposium on Cell Fate in Cancer and Development tomorrow

ccri.at/st-anna-ccri...

Un viaggio all’origine dei sistemi nervosi Il nuovo progetto GRNevo, finanziato con un grant FIS-3 Advanced da 1,9 milioni di euro, studierà come si formano i neuroni durante lo sviluppo in specie animali molto distanti tra loro: dal moscerino...

Thrilled to share that I’ve been awarded a FIS-3 Advanced Grant (ERC-inspired) to study the evolution of neurogenic GRNs.
Recruiting soon: 4 postdocs + 3 PhDs
Press release in Italian — to decolonise scientific language 😄
magazine.unibo.it/it/articoli/...
Email me if interested in joining the lab

Feb 1 deadline approaching for our @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social QBio summer course on Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals. @streichan.bsky.social
@maurazimmermann.bsky.social @maizel-lab.org @yusuke-mori.bsky.social @akankshi.bsky.social @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social

There's still time to apply to be a 2026 @dev-journal.bsky.social Pathway to Independence fellow

For those about to apply for their first independent academic position, the programme offers

- mentoring
- leadership training
- profile rising
- networking

journals.biologists.com/dev/pages/pi...

In preprints: the deep evolutionary roots of Cajal-Retzius cells Vertebrates show a striking diversity of brain size and morphology. Mammals, in particular, have an especially large cerebral cortex, presenting with a characteristic six-layered structure that is bel...

We're happy to highlight two very exciting preprints from @idoiaeu.bsky.social and @matosches.bsky.social about the evolution of Cajal-Retzius cells. Find our perspective in @dev-journal.bsky.social here:
doi.org/10.1242/dev....

A screenshot of the 'The hard truth about how hard it is to publish in Development' article PDF.

The hard truth about how hard it is to publish in Development

Editor-in-Chief @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social leads our team of Academic Editors in addressing the perception that Development is ‘too hard to publish in’ by discussing the journal's review process.

doi.org/10.1242/dev....

We had a great experience publishing in Development (doi.org/10.1242/dev....). High-quality reviews, quick turnaround, and our editor (Jim Wells) was very helpful and provided feedback about the reviewers comments.

Supporting early-career researchers On these pages we highlight the range of resources that we offer to early-career researchers.

We believe that, as our future leaders in biology, it is vital to provide #ECRs with the right support during the early stages of your academic career. We offer a number of practical ways to help you meet the unique needs and challenges you may encounter: www.biologists.com/about-us/ear...

At the helm of JCS – Editors-in-Chief past, present… and future The Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of Journal of Cell Science plays a key role in defining the overall vision of the journal, helping to decide on journal strategy, policy and priorities, and overseeing all co...

What's it like being Editor-in-chief of @jcellsci.bsky.social? doi.org/10.1242/jcs....

Delighted & honoured to have given the Jean Brachet Memorial Lecture for the International Society for Differentiation

Thanks to the Indian SDB for hosting and to Sally Dunwoodie for the generous introduction.