The cover image from our article in the June 21 issue of Biophysical Journal is of blooming lilies. My lab’s research on lilies was driven forward by two very different events: my mother-in-law planted flowers in my back yard about a decade ago, and the global pandemic shut down university laboratories across the United States in 2020.

One could ask: why would I possibly be interested in lilies given that my lab’s primary focus is on micron-scale phase separation in lipid membranes? Well, years ago I had seen L. Mahadevan give a marvelous seminar on edge growth in lily tepals. The ideas he presented inspired me to snip some lily buds from my garden and track their shapes as they bloomed, first in my kitchen at home and then in my lab. Eventually, Thomas Portet, a talented postdoctoral fellow in the lab at the time, became curious about why lilies kept mysteriously appearing on our lab bench. It was Thomas who turned my weekend puttering into a well-posed scientific question by asking how ripples at tepal edges evolve through time. Thomas also turned the project into a mentoring opportunity by enlisting an undergraduate, Peter Holmes, to analyze our data.

However, we had a problem. My lab has microscopes with fast shutters to image lipid membranes, but we needed “macro”-scopes with slow time-lapses to image lilies. Jennifer Nemhauser (my University of Washington colleague in plant biology) and her lab kindly made room for a lily in one of her environmentally controlled growth chambers. In Jennifer’s lab, we were successful in capturing movies of tepals rippling, but we also wished that we had X-ray vision to see inside buds before they bloomed. I suspected that Jerry Seidler, an expert on X-ray light sources, might have good ideas, and he did! He introduced us to Mark Bowen at the Pacific Northwest National Labs, who helped us access the X-ray tomography facility of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory. Mark connected us with future co-authors who took the beautiful tomograms in our paper: Tamas Varga and a high-school intern named Sean Stephens.

Then the project stalled. For years.

When the pandemic hit, the University of Washington was one of the first in the United States to restrict on-site research. It was also one of the last to fully reopen. How could we drive science forward without access to the lab, or even to the physical resources in the library? We decided to revive the lily project. Two graduate students in the lab, Zack Cohen and Gunnar Goetz, used their forced hiatus from the bench to take an image-analysis course. They teamed up with a classmate, Nicole Panek, to write original code to analyze thicknesses of lily tepals. In the meantime, I built a bench in my garage to take videos of blooming lilies from three angles. The mirrors were easy to source from the walls of my home, but, once again, I lacked a camera capable of long time-lapses. Julie Graber, a photographer in my neighborhood, lent me hers. Neighbors across the street admitted to being a little curious why so many reading lamps were suddenly blazing in my garage throughout the night.

Finally, with data, analysis, and a manuscript draft in hand, our team was ready to solicit feedback from the entire team of co-authors. But where were they now? Some of their old e-mail addresses were defunct. In tracking down old trainees, it was a pleasure to learn about their successes. Thomas had joined Microsoft. Peter had become a dentist. Sean had joined Dropbox. Three equally important contributors were our anonymous reviewers. As we noted in our acknowledgements, their feedback was “outstandingly constructive.” In our cover photo, my hands are just outside of the frame of view, holding the lilies while Thomas snapped the photo. Similarly, our reviewers, their names outside our view, shaped our final manuscript.

In some cultures, lilies are funereal flowers because they symbolize rebirth. Our cover picture of a lily will always remind me of a pandemic filled with the tragedy of illness and death, which continues to unfold. It will also remind me of how my lab, my neighbors, and even our anonymous reviewers generously came together as a community to reshape our previously orphaned project into a thing of beauty.

- Thomas Portet, Zachary R. Cohen, Gunnar J. Goetz, Nicole Panek, Peter N. Holmes, Sean A. Stephens, Tamas Varga, and Sarah L. Keller