The people behind the papers – Roberta Azzarelli and Anna Philpott

ASCL1 is a pioneer factor that can reprogram somatic cells to produce neurons. Preventing ASCL1 from being phosphorylated appears to enhance its reprogramming abilities, but the reason for this is unclear. A new paper in Development explores how ASCL1 activity is affected by different cellular contexts and reveals that the basis of the reprogramming efficiency of ASCL1 is more complicated than it first appears. To learn more about the story behind the paper, we caught up with first author Roberta Azzarelli, who is now a Lecturer in Pharmacology at University College London, UK, and corresponding author Anna Philpott, Professor of Cancer and Developmental Biology at the University of Cambridge, UK.