Esme Hedley in Nature:
One morning in 2009, Jacqueline Tabler woke up with the solution to a laboratory problem that had been plaguing her for months. She got out of bed, grabbed her notebook, and started sketching out an experiment that had come to her in a dream.
Tabler, then a developmental-biology PhD student at King’s College London, was struggling to reproduce data using methods from previous work in the lab that had shown the function of an enzyme, called PAR-1, in the development of frog embryos. She had the idea to perform a grafting experiment, taking a layer of cells expressing excess PAR-1 from one embryo and transplanting them onto an embryo that does not express the enzyme. By comparing these grafted embryos with control grafts expressing typical levels of PAR1, Tabler hoped to see what happened to the cells as the embryos created neurons. “It was a fantastical answer,” she says. “I knew what I had to do was graft from one embryo to another embryo, follow the tissue, and then I would figure it out.”
More here.
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