The people behind the papers – Veronica Biga and Cerys Manning

Notch target genes HES1 and HES5 mutually repress one another, while also exhibiting oscillatory expression across tissues, to regulate cell fate specification, during mammalian neural tube development. In their work, Veronica Biga, Cerys Manning and colleagues show that there is a mechanistic link between oscillatory expression of the cross-repressive factors HES1 and HES5, and fate resolution in the developing spinal cord. To learn more about their work, we talked to the first author Veronica Biga, as well as the corresponding author, Cerys Manning, Presidential Fellow in the School of Medicine and Lecturer in Developmental Biology, Division of Developmental Biology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK.