Volume 12 Issue 7, July 2015

A way to generate recombinant progeny of Plasmodium falciparum for genetics experiments, and the virtues of scuba diving.

Carefully designed subplots scaled to the data are often superior to a single complex overview plot.

Two methods capture the pausing behavior of RNA polymerase II as it generates messages from mammalian genomes.

An automated platform mass-produces RNAs incorporating a wide variety of precisely positioned chemical alterations.

The highest-resolution structure solved by cryo-electron microscopy to date reveals what it takes to reach the resolution realm of X-ray crystallography.

Coculture of three cell types on hydrogel with the appropriate stiffness enables the generation of functional organ buds.

The family of designer receptors now includes an orthogonally activated member for multiplexed chemogenetic control of neural activity.

A Commentary proposes that in order to improve statistical power in mass spectrometry–based proteomics data analysis, irrelevant peptides should be removed from the database prior to searching.

Measuring how much a fruit fly eats opens the door to studies of metabolism and aging. But the assays are hotly debated.

Portions of the CRISPR-Cas9 guide RNA can be reworked to carry functional RNA cargos to genomic loci.

International Cancer Genome Consortium members review and recommend approaches to pathway and network analysis to uncover molecular processes that contribute to tumor biology.

The first report of the ICGC-TCGA DREAM Somatic Mutation Calling Challenge introduces the BAMSurgeon tool for accurate tumor simulation and reports the performance of 248 submissions in calling single-nucleotide variants from three pairs of synthetic tumor–normal genome benchmarks.

A human-liver chimeric mouse supports the growth of recombinant Plasmodium falciparum progeny, enabling easy analysis of genetic crosses between parasite strains.

Tissues from multicellular organisms can be imaged by cryo-electron tomography using an optimized combination of vitrification, milling and application of fiducial markers.

This paper shows that microfluidic perfusion frequency can be optimized to improve the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells along different lineages, and uses this principle to achieve functional hPSC differentiation directly on a chip.

Light-sheet microscopy using a single objective and micromirrors to orient the light sheet enables high- and super-resolution imaging of cells and embryos on a standard microscope.

Primed conversion of proteins such as Dendra2 confines photoconversion to a limited 3Dvolume through a sequential absorption process relying on illumination with two separate low-intensity lasers and enables precise targeting of single cells.

Dynamic nuclear polarization–based solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopyis applied to study the structure of a large bacterial membrane protein complex in its cellular environment.

An analytical method, with accompanying software, is described for improved fidelity in traction force microscopy and is used to measure forces at emerging focal adhesions at high resolution.

A robotic system is described that uses machine vision guidance to pick, manipulate, inspect and dissect individual flies, enabling large-scale and automated approaches to the analysis of morphology, behavior and neural dynamics.

Bioluminescence resonance energy transfer, from the substrate of a luciferase fused with a G protein–coupled receptor to a fluorescent dye covalently linked to a receptor ligand, allows the profiling of ligand affinity and binding kinetics.

CRISPR-Display is a modular and flexible platform that targets natural or synthetic noncoding RNA domains to specific genomic loci for functional studies and synthetic biology.

A method for 3D differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells yields brain cortical spheroids with functional neurons and astrocytes. The spheroids can be sliced for imaging and electrophysiological studies.

A computational approach—including a cross-validation metric—for automated model building and refinement using X-ray fiber diffraction data is described and applied to solve structures of protein fibers.

The Cluster-Chip provides highly efficient and gentle capture of circulating tumor cell clusters from milliliters of unprocessed whole blood, making it possible to study how these clusters contribute to metastasis.