The Rockefeller University Press

As is true for many fields of research, cell biology has always been propelled forward by technological innovations (Botstein, 2010). Thanks to these advances we now have access to micro scopes and other equipment with exquisite resolution and sen sitivity, a variety of methods to track and quantify biological molecules, and many ingenious tools to manipulate genes, mol ecules, organelles, and cells. In addition, we have hardware and software that enable us to analyze our data, and build models of cells and their components. Naturally, even today’s technologies have limitations, and hence there is always need for improvements and for completely novel approaches that create new opportunities. Cell biology is one of the research areas with many chances for individual young scientists to invent and develop such new technologies. Numerous recent examples illustrate that such “bottomup ” efforts can be highly successful across all areas in cell biology; e.g., as a handy vector for RNA interference (Brummelkamp et al., 2002); as methods for visualization of protein–protein or protein– DNA interactions (Roux et al., 2012; Kind et al., 2013); as tools to study chromatin (van Steensel et al., 2001), ribonucleo protein complexes (Ule et al., 2003), or translation (Ingolia et al., 2009); or as tags for sensitive protein detection (Tanenbaum et al., 2014), just to name a few examples. As a student or postdoc, you may similarly conceive an idea for a new method or tool. Usually this idea is inspired by a biological question that you are trying to address in your Correspondence to Bas van Steensel