The people behind the papers – Dillan Saunders and Benjamin Steventon

During early development, embryos coordinate the growth of different tissues to ensure that they reach the correct proportions. A new paper in Development shows that tissue scaling occurs in the tail of the post-gastrulation zebrafish embryo. The study suggests that this scaling is underpinned by multi-tissue tectonics, a mechanism whereby the deformation of one growing tissue can impact the dynamics of a neighbouring tissue. To learn more about the story behind the paper, we caught up with first author Dillan Saunders and corresponding author Benjamin Steventon, an Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, UK.