Volume 18 Issue 8, August 2021

A neuroscientist who jams, plays and builds a way to capture animal movement.

I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along. —Bertrand Russell

Life scientists in Africa have had limited opportunity to participate in international advanced scientific training programs and workshops, which largely benefit researchers in North America, Europe and the Asia–Pacific region. Here, we chronicle the strategies adopted and challenges encountered in organizing Imaging Africa, an all-expenses-paid, continent-wide practical workshop in optical microscopy hosted in South Africa from 13 to 17 January 2020. Our experience can help steer other groups who similarly seek to organize impactful and sustainable training initiatives in Africa.

Development of methods for single-cell proteomics increases depth and throughput

Researchers design DNA shells to trap virus particles and thus prevent interactions between viruses and host cells.

Chromatin accessibility, proteins levels and other features measured from the same cells.

Applying principles from super-resolution fluorescence microscopy increases the resolution of atomic force microscopy.

A yeast cell culture approach mimics the benefits of somatic hypermutation to accelerate the discovery of desirable antibodies.

New ways to assess plant–microbe interactions can yield unexpected paths to biodiversity.

A four-dimensional single-cell atlas of transcription factor expression in Caenorhabditis elegans allows the identification of novel regulators of embryo development and the generation of molecular models of cell fate specification.

A combined experimental and computational approach to transcriptomic profiling of cell ‘multiplets’ enables the reconstruction of cell–cell interactions and higher-order structural features of biological tissues.

New computational approaches capture molecular motion from cryo-EM images and provide a more complete understanding of protein dynamics.

A review on recent method development for discovering T cell antigens.

This Review discusses methodological advances for high-throughput analysis of the TCR repertoire at bulk and single-cell resolution.

A protein expression atlas of transcription factors charted onto cell lineage maps of Caenorhabditis elegans development that uncovers mechanisms of spatiotemporal cell fate patterning and regulators of embryogenesis.

Single-cell combinatorial indexed cytometry sequencing (SCITO-seq) combines split-pool indexing and droplet-based single-cell sequencing for single-cell protein profiling.

CIM-seq offers an unsupervised deconvolution method to profile cell–cell interactions by sequencing cell multiplets of a given tissue, and was employed to analyze diverse tissues such as the intestinal epithelium, lung and spleen.

StrucGP offers a de novo glycan mapping method to determine detailed N-glycan structures at the site-specific level.

e2gmm uses a deep neural network with a Gaussian representation to resolve the compositional and conformational variability within biomolecules using cryo-EM data.

Paint server and homology optimization pipeline (PaintSHOP), an interactive platform for the design of oligo fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) experiments, democratizes and standardizes the process of designing complex probe sets for the oligo FISH community.

Acoustic reporter genes can be imaged with high sensitivity using the BURST imaging sequence, allowing the detection of single cells under optimal conditions.

RAPID (rapid autofocusing via pupil-split image phase detection) is a sample-agnostic real-time autofocus method for widefield microscopy. RAPID removes most image degradation in large, cleared samples for enhanced quantitative analyses.

COMPACT allows imaging of large volumes in the brain through a periscope-like probe inside a glass capillary.

Two conditional transgenic mouse lines based on CRISPRa and CRISPRi enable epigenome editing in vivo.

LiftPose3D infers three-dimensional poses from two-dimensional data or from limited three-dimensional data. The approach is illustrated for videos of behaving Drosophila, mice, rats and macaques.