Volume 13 Issue 5, May 2016

Measuring phosphoproteins reproducibly and taking time to bike.

Residual plots can be used to validate assumptions about the regression model.

Researchers target fluorescent protein–Cas9 fusions to specific mRNAs for tracking in live cells.

A miniature platform for studying corals at microscale resolution sheds new light on their biology.

By coupling protein cross-linking with reversible affinity purification of cross-linked fragments, a newly reported tool should enable many applications in structural and systems biology.

The Magneto channel, an orthogonal tool for optogenetic actuators, provides magnetic control over neuronal activity.

A computational tool enables the study of native nonribosomal RNA–protein complexes from ribosome profiling data.

A hybrid of a photo-responsive ligand and a small-molecule inhibitor enables optical control of epigenetic mechanisms.

Tools are emerging to help labs trawl for sequences that reveal microbial strains and their functional potential in deep pools of metagenomic data.

There is a growing appreciation that mechanical forces have important roles in many aspects of biology. This review provides a survey of methods for measuring the forces exerted by cells and discusses technical barriers to their implementation.

A method (and resource) demonstrating the mining of information from large-scale phosphoproteomics data sets is presented, allowing users to build targeted parallel reaction monitoring mass spectrometry assays to study phosphosites of interest.

PanPhlAn detects strains and characterizes strain-specific gene content and activity within metagenomic and metatranscriptomic samples for microbial population analysis and epidemiology.

Quantitative points accumulation in nanoscale topography (qPAINT) makes use of predictable binding kinetics between DNA-PAINT imager and docking strands to achieve accurate and precise counting of molecules in spatially unresolved complexes.

Principal component analysis on a subset of differentially methylated regions in a mixture of cell types is the basis of ReFACTor, a program to account for heterogeneity in epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS).

Microfluidic reprogramming of human somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells is rapid and highly efficient, enabling large-scale derivation from patient cells as well as seamless on-chip differentiation without cell expansion.

Ligand-triggered ribosomal frameshifting allows control of the relative stoichiometry of two proteins and enables the building of logic gates from a single mRNA.