Let’s start with a welcome: Welcome to Stepwise.

I know that Nature Protocols has had a blog for quite a while now but over the last few months we have let things slide a bit, chiefly because we knew the change in our blogging platform would give us an opportunity to do more things. Also we had the chance to give it a proper name; “Nature Protocols Blog” being no-one’s favourite.

The no-one’s in question-in other words the authors of this blog-are: Chris Surridge (that’s me), Katharine Barnes, Dot Clyde, Hannah Clarke and Bronwen Dekker. Collectively the editors of Nature Protocols and the guardians of the Protocol Exchange. We tend to blog about different things and hopefully you will pick up on our various interests with time. The thing to bear in mind is that Katharine, Dot, Hannah and Bronwen know stuff, while I just pontificate.

Why Stepwise?

The very first blog post for the Nature Protocols blog was in May 2010, and asked the very important question: “What should we call our blog?”. While we all agreed that out blog should have an outstanding name, we were not able to get terribly much further than “Nature Protocols Blog” until Dot looked up from her computer in a commissioning meeting and said:  Stepwise! Well protocols are made up from procedural steps and we try very hard to be wise about them. I hope that isn’t too much of a cryptic crossword clue justification.

What we will do here is continue to share news, helpful hints on how to use our nature Protocols and Protocol Exchange, comments about our protocols, or give updates from conferences.
These are handily organised into the following categories:

• Hints and Wrinkles
• News and Updates
• Spotlights 
• There and Back Again

We might blog about things that just catch our eyes as well.If you are new in these parts here are some example posts that highlight what we are all about:

• Recipes for Research
• The arrival of guidelines for reporting experiments
• Focusing on stem cells
• Nature Protocols Roundup
• Notes from the 3rd EMBO meeting, Vienna
• Update on inserting images into Exchange Protocols

We try to maintain an active twitter account for news about published protocols, and other things we happen to find interesting.
Follow us at: @NatureProtocolsIf you would like to contact us you can also email: protocols@nature.comOr just comment ion this blog. We’ll do our best to answer your questions. What do you want to know?