Genes that express in precisely timed patterns, known as oscillatory genes, play an essential role in development functions like cell division, circadian rhythms and limb formation. But without a time-lapse view of genetic expression, these genes have gone largely undiscovered.

An algorithm developed by Co-Director James Thomson and colleagues is giving scientists a new way to identify the dynamics of oscillatory genes, and perhaps defining the roles of these early-development forces for the first time.

A paper published in this week’s online edition of Nature Methods describes this new statistical approach, called “Oscope,” which helps identify oscillating genes in single-cell RNA-sequencing experiments. The key to Oscope is examining cells from an unsynchronized population, where the cells are in different developmental states.