Volume 15 Issue 8, August 2018

Probes, optics for super-resolution microscopy and life in a creative country.

Customize the experiment for the setting instead of adjusting the setting to fit a classical design.

The STARmap method advances RNA sequencing in intact tissues.

Reversible primer termination, enabled by polymerase–nucleotide conjugates, provides an enzymatic method for the de novo synthesis of oligonucleotides.

Cas9 induces larger-than-anticipated mutations in mouse and human cells. In the latter, efficient editing depends on inhibition of the DNA-damage-repair protein p53.

Self-assembled nanoparticles give insight into the regulation of macromolecular crowding.

The genetically encoded sensor dLight1 reports dopamine release in culture, slices and behaving mice.

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) advances can ease the path to 3D renderings of cellular architecture.

Quanti.us is a platform that allows large-scale manual image annotation by a distributed workforce through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace.

Overexpression of mouse thymic-stromal-cell-derived lymphopoietin in immune-compromised mice that harbor a reconstituted human immune system rescues lymph node formation and enhances adaptive immune responses.

Active PSF shaping and adaptive optics are combined to enable 3D localization microscopy throughout thick tissues. The method was used to study the nanoscale architecture of amyloid fibrils in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.

Annotated image data are required for image analysis, to test analytical methods, and to train learning algorithms. This paper describes and characterizes a tool that allows researchers to crowdsource image-annotation tasks.

Strelka2 incorporates improvements for fast and accurate calling of somatic and germline single-nucleotide variants and indels.

The synthetic-diploid (Syndip) benchmark dataset, constructed from two fully homozygous long-read assemblies, provides more accurate assessments of error rates in small-variant-calling algorithms than existing benchmarks.

A C-SWAT acceptor library allows the user to easily insert any tag of choice after yeast ORFs by swapping it for the acceptor module.

Bright reversibly switching red fluorescent proteins (rsFusionReds) with fast switching kinetics and low fatigue enable RESOLFT and MoNaLISA nanoscopy of live cells with green-orange illumination, which further reduces the risk of phototoxicity.

Flood-filling networks are a deep-learning-based pipeline for reconstruction of neurons from electron microscopy datasets. The approach results in exceptionally low error rates, thereby reducing the need for extensive human proofreading.

The fusion of dead Cas9 with KRAB and the transcriptional repressor domain of the chromatin modifier MeCP2 leads to an efficient transcriptional silencer that can be applied to genome-scale screens and genetic circuits.

A genome-wide collection of N-terminally tagged yeast libraries allows easy swapping of tags and exploration of the yeast proteome.

Humanized mouse models are useful for studies of human hematopoiesis and immunity. Li et al. report an improved model that harbors lymph nodes and therefore permits investigation of local human adaptive immune processes in secondary lymphoid tissue.

Cerebral organoids are developed into in vitro models of human brain cancer by CRISPR–Cas9- and/or transposon-mediated introduction of oncogenic mutations.