Volume 7 Issue 4, April 2010

Researchers watch proteins interact in real time.

A new study, pooling brain-imaging data from 35 centers across the world, shows the power of data sharing and demonstrates a universal architecture of functional connections in the human brain.

Visualizing binding data in the form of specificity landscapes yields new insight into the behavior of DNA-binding molecules.

A genome-wide map of nucleosome positions in Schizosaccharomyces pombe points to a positioning mechanism different from that of other organisms.

Researchers develop a method to label GlcNAc residues of N-glycans in yeast with high specificity and efficiency.

A new cell-based fluorescent reporter system allows direct visualization of individual cells infected with hepatitis C virus in real time.

A creative application of protein labeling can probe uncharacterized genomes.

Nonlinear optical microscopy lets researchers see chemical composition in living cells and organisms.

Tracking the spatiotemporal dynamics of bacterial effectors injected into single living host cells has become possible with a split GFP–based method.

Stochastic profiling, a method to rank heterogeneity of gene expression in a cell population, shows that quantifying cell-to-cell variability has come of age and leads to biological insight.

The introduction of new and accurate force fields for atom-atom interactions into the Rosetta framework allows the recovery of native-like RNA structures.

Using DNA microarray–derived gene expression data from complex tissues and the relative frequencies of cell types in the tissue as input the algorithm csSAM finds cell type–specific differentially expressed genes.

A Rosetta full-atom framework, called fragment assembly of RNA with full-atom refinement (FARFAR), allows the de novo structure prediction and design of noncanonical RNA motifs with near-atomic resolution.

Fast protein interaction dynamics can be observed in cells via a fluorescence correlation spectroscopy–based method. Endogenous bait proteins are captured via quantum dots, and their interaction with fluorescently tagged prey proteins is monitored with high temporal resolution.

Comparing the haplotypes of a few randomly microdissected chromosomes to a full genome-wide haplotype allows one to determine the long-range haplotype of chromosomes for which only one copy was captured.

A side-view endoscope permits the imaging of large fields of gastrointestinal and respiratory mucosa at high resolution in the mouse. The approach is applied to imaging changes during inflammation and tumor progression in the living mouse.

A Toxoplasma gondii strain that efficiently secretes Cre recombinase into infected host cells permits the deletion of genes specifically in the infected cells. It should facilitate the study of host-pathogen interactions in vitro and in vivo.

By stochastically sampling cells in groups of ten, the authors identify transcriptional programs with strong cell-to-cell expression differences thus allowing them to study endogenous heterogeneities in single cells.

Protein dynamics can be studied in single living cells by time-resolved fluorescent imaging of the unfolding of a fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) probe—labeled protein as fast temperature jumps are applied.

Using a GFP complementation assay to tag effectors of the type-III secretion system in gram-negative bacteria allows localization of the effectors in the host cell in the course of bacterial infection.