Bringing the past into the future with JCS and FocalPlane

As The Company of Biologists celebrates its 100-year anniversary, Saanjbati Adhikari and Seema Grewal look back over the history and evolution of Journal of Cell Science – from its early days as the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science (QJMS) to the publication we are familiar with today.  You can read about the past, present and future of JCS here, and the accompanying timeline presents some of the key events in the journal’s past.

Of course, as FocalPlane Community Manager, the origins of JCS as QJMS are of particular interest to me. QJMS was launched in 1853 to ‘disseminate information on technical microscopical advancements and microscopical studies in any scientific field.’ There are a number of statements in the preface to the first edition that caught my eye because they are still highly relevant today:

•  The Editors Edwin Lankester and George Busk express their delight at having retained the services of lithographer Tuffen West, recognising the importance of high-quality figures when disseminating microscopy data. You can see an example of one of the figure plates from the article ‘On the Embryogeny of Orchis mascula’ by Spencer Cobbold, which was published in the first issue of QJMS. These drawings, often acquired with the aid of camera lucida, are an early form of bioimage analysis, as the researcher segments the tissues in their diagrams. The evolution in bioimage analysis is striking when we compare these drawings (and their accompanying description) to TiNeQuant, a Fiji tool for automated 3D quantification of tissue networks from Thomas Rauchenwald, Heimo Wolinski, Martine Schweiger and colleagues, which was published in our current issue of JCS ­­­­- but nevertheless, segmentation is at the heart of both! We have some excellent ‘How to’ posts on the latest segmentation methods on FocalPlane, including a post on quality assurance from Mara Lampert and a post on SAM for Bioimage Analysis from Ranit Karmakar.

• One of the main sections of QJMS comprised reviews of other research work. These articles are more like peer reviews, rather than the Review articles that we now see in JCS. Interestingly, the Editors state in the preface that ‘It is the wish of the Editors to conduct this department in a friendly spirit, regarding all who labour honestly in the field of science as co-workers for the common good.’ These wise words could be equally applied to the peer review system that we currently use. At JCS, authors have the option to share the peer review history alongside their article, thus making the discourse public, just as we saw back in 1853.
• Another major section in the first issues of QJMS was for short notes, memoranda and correspondence. In including this section, the Editors recognised the value of ‘…fragments of information which singly might appear to be useless but together are of great importance to science…’. While our means of communicating research tips have vastly increased, often materials and methods sections are not detailed enough for researchers to be able to fully reproduce techniques. This is where our ‘How to’ section on FocalPlane could help. If you are interested in writing your top tips for a microscopy or cell biology method in the form of a short note, please get in contact. One of our most read posts on FocalPlane is on fixation artifacts and how to minimise them from Heather Brown-Harding. I would also love to have a section on FocalPlane on ‘what not to do…’, if anyone is brave enough to share the stories of their failed experiments!

Over the course of 2025, we’ll continue to share stories about the last 100 years of microscopy in JCS and on FocalPlane. It’s been fun to look back at the beginnings of JCS and see how much of what was written in 1853 is still relevant today. If you are inspired to contribute a blog post to FocalPlane, then, once registered, you are free to go ahead and post. If you want to discuss your ideas or share your draft, you can get in touch with me at focalplane@biologists.com.

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