Volume 8 Issue 11, November 2011

Pure oligodendrocyte populations can be made without cell sorting.

Researchers synthesize chromosome arms to facilitate genetic studies in yeast.

A combination of methods permits clonal tracking of mouse hematopoietic stem cells.

An improved algorithm for genomic analysis allows scientists to build remarkably accurate and complete genomic sequences from single bacterial cells.

Engineered ion channels and cognate synthetic ligands expand the catalog of tools to study brain function.

A new chip and high-content imaging allow thousands of surface patterns to be tested for their influence on cell behavior.

Mechanical force can revert the stable triazole product of the 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition back to the starting azide and alkyne components.

The potential is vast—but so is the uncertainty.

Isobaric tagging methods allow multiplexed quantitative analysis of a wide variety of proteome samples but have been severely limited by problems of accuracy. Two groups now explore this issue and provide complementary solutions to address the problem.

A hydrogel microdevice speeds up the investigation of microenvironmental parameters that direct stem-cell differentiation.

In this Review, the authors thoroughly discuss solution-state NMR spectroscopy methods used for characterizing the dynamic structure landscape of RNA molecules, from picosecond to second timescale motions.

A mass spectrometry instrument control method—QuantMode—allows accurate, large-scale, multiplexed quantitative proteomics measurements using isobaric tagging by removing the problem of precursor interference. Also in this issue, Ting et al. provide a different solution to the same problem.

A triple-stage mass spectrometry (MS3)-based method is used to remove ratio interference, resulting in accurate, large-scale, multiplexed quantitative proteomics measurements using isobaric labeling. Also in this issue, Wenger et al. provide a different solution to the same problem.

A simple episomal fluorescent reporter for flow cytometric enrichment of cells with zinc-finger nuclease– or TALE nuclease–induced genomic modifications is described.

A computational approach for analysis of gene expression in heterogeneous samples of varying composition is presented. The authors used it to study expression in brain samples from humans with Huntington's disease.

Soft hydrogel microwell arrays with controllably variable stiffness are spotted with proteins of interest, individually or in combination. The system permits in vitro study of the biophysical and biochemical aspects of the stem-cell niche.

Reported is the robust directed differentiation of mouse epiblast stem cells to oligodendrocyte precursor cells, which then differentiate into myelinating oligodendrocytes in vitro and in vivo. The system should prove useful for basic research and for drug screens.

The question of whether transcription factories containing RNA polymerases exist has been controversial, owing to the fact that they have not been isolated previously. Now, a method to carefully isolate these complexes and analyze their proteomes by mass spectrometry is described.

Implementation of pair correlation analysis for photoactivated localization microscopy allows quantitative analysis of protein clustering in the plasma membrane, revealing the degree to which different perturbations alter protein arrangements.

Owing to a lack of tools and a lack of a consensus sequence for O-glycosylation, studies of the O-glycoproteome have been few and far between, despite the biological importance of O-glycosylation. This method to analyze O-glycan attachment sites to proteins using glycoengineered cell lines with simplified, homogenous O-glycoproteomes should facilitate future O-glycoproteomics studies.