MB&B would like to congratulate graduate student Kirsten Reimer of the Neugebauer lab for creating the cover for the March 4th edition of the Molecular Cell Journal. Her design is an artistic interpretation of the data from her article, “Co-transcriptional splicing regulates 3’ end cleavage during mammalian erythropoiesis,” that will be published in this edition along with her cover art. Anyone who gets a paper accepted in Molecular Cell can submit a cover design that is related to the accepted article. While Kirsten does not consider herself an artist, she and Dr. Neugebauer knew that designing the cover would be a great way to promote her work.
On the meaning of her design, Reimer says “the individual lines are nascent RNA, and then there are gaps in some of them to represent the spliced RNA” which is her artistic take on the raw data from her paper. She found this raw data the most interesting aspect of her paper, so she wanted to highlight it in her design. While Kirsten has published reviews and method papers before, this is her first publication on her own research, so designing the cover was an exciting way to bring more publicity to her research. Be sure to check out Kirsten Reimer’s beautiful cover and her first-author paper in this issue of Molecular Cell!
By Jake Thrasher