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Modified fly-through rendering of an endoscopy image of blood vessels in the descending colon of a mouse. The blood vessels were labeled by intravenous injection of fluorescent dextran. Original image provided by Seok Yun and modified by Erin Dewalt. Brief Communication p303
The experimental tractability of biological systems makes it possible to explore the idea that causal relationships can be estimated from observational data.
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.
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.