Broader, bigger, better — that's what we hope this site will become. Previously branded as 'nBME community' — because it was exclusively associated with the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, launched in January 2017 — and informally known as In Translation, the site has seen contributions from the vast majority of teams of authors who published papers in the journal. Such 'Behind the paper' contributions convey how the project came to be, the authors' viewpoint of what was most important in developing the ideas that led to the results, the bottlenecks encountered and how these were overcome, and the broader prospects of their findings. You won't find all these aspects in the published paper.

The 'Behind the paper' posts have naturally become the most-read section of this community site. Three particularly engaging examples of such stories are a technique for recovering injured lungs for transplantation, rapid and slide-free histology, and an implantable paediatric devices that accommodate growth.

Uninvited (yet welcome!) contributions, although few, have enriched the site's content. In particular, the informative posts from Thamarasee Jeewandara are worth a special mention. We in the editorial team of Nature Biomedical engineering have also contributed by highlighting research and news in biomedical engineering. And, funnily, have attempted to educate you about how not to write well.

Yet this site was always meant to offer space to a wider range of contributors, beyond those authors published in Nature Biomedical Engineering and beyond other invited authors of broadly relevant work published elsewhere. We also feel that contributors will benefit from reaching a broader community of scientists working in the applied life sciences, an audience that is much bigger than the natural readership of Nature Biomedical engineering. We have therefore broadened the remit of this site to include biotechnology and applied biology. To reflect this, the site has been re-branded as Bioengineering (or, in long-winded form, the Nature Research Bioengineering community site). This follows similar initiatives by the Microbiology and the Ecology and Evolution communities from Nature Research.

We hope that this change will make the site far richer (in content), more diverse (in topics and contributors) and better (in many ways). You will soon start seeing more 'Behind the paper' contributions from authors of broadly relevant bioengineering work published in Nature Research journals and elsewhere, as well as more news and highlights across fields spanning applied biology and applied biomedicine.

This community is, and will remain, open. Regardless of whether you are interested in engineering principles or tools for biomedicine or for biology, you are welcome to read and contribute to it (by writing or commenting). After all, scientific innovations are often born at the interfaces between fields, and grow up via transdisciplinary interactions. We entice you, via this site, to engage in such discussion.