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Methods section too short? Use online protocols to make complex techniques understandable

New wet-lab methods can be hard to share owing to their complexity, but with a little extra effort, you can give users a leg-up in getting started.
By
  1. Lars Borm

    1. Lars Borm is a postdoctoral fellow at the Catholic University Leuven in Belgium and the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology in Ghent, Belgium, and is an unpaid ambassador for Protocols.io.

The human brain is beautiful and complex. When viewed with the proper tools, the seemingly homogeneous mass is revealed to have intricate layers, folds and structures. In Sten Linnarsson’s laboratory at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where I did my graduate research, we developed methods to uncover these patterns on the basis of differences in gene expression from cell to cell. We used this information to identify and distinguish different cell types in the brain and to understand their spatial organization.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03249-2

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 25 October 2023: This Career column erroneously stated that protocols.io is not hosted by a journal publisher. The platform is owned by Springer Nature.

References

  1. Borm, L. E. et al. Nature Biotechnol. 41, 222–231 (2023).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Braun, E. et al. Science 382, eadf1226 (2023).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Siletti, K. et al. Science 382, eadd7046 (2023).

    Article  Google Scholar 

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Competing Interests

L.E.B. is a shareholder in EEL Transcriptomics AB, which owns the intellectual property of the EEL FISH method (“Spatial RNA localization method”, provisional US patent application 63/139,701), and is an unpaid ambassador for Protocols.io.

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