It can be challenging to understand the dynamics of gene expression patterns when embryos develop inside a uterus, making it impossible to image changes to gene expression in real time. A new paper in Development presents a pipeline where images of mouse embryos at discrete developmental timepoints can be used to reconstruct a continuous description of gene expression changes over time. To learn more about the story behind the paper, we caught up with first author Laura Aviñó-Esteban and corresponding author James Sharpe, Head of EMBL Barcelona, Spain.