Volume 11 Issue 6, June 2014

He switched from designing fluorescent proteins to investigating immunology.

Good experimental designs limit the impact of variability and reduce sample-size requirements.

Researchers co-opt a DNA sequencer to quantify RNA-protein interactions on a massive scale.

Spectral confocal reflectance microscopy helps visualize myelinated axons in vivo without any labeling.

Dinucleotide repeat motifs and transcription factor–binding sites are sufficient to define enhancers.

Engineering of channelrhodopsin into a Cl⁻ channel creates a powerful tool for light-mediated inhibition of neurons.

An electronic, molecular fingerprinting method may lead to an approach to single-molecule protein sequencing.

Two groups report the derivation of human pluripotent stem cell lines from embryos derived by somatic cell nuclear transfer using adult cells as donors.

A method enables labeling and detection of newly synthesized proteins in an animal in a tissue- and time-specific manner.

Cell lines are better. Mice are better. Beyond disagreement about model systems and even passionate discord at times, new strategies help to explore the middle ground so models might better approximate human biology.

Experimenter gender affects behavioral assays of pain and stress in laboratory mice.

Adaptive optics microscopy using a de-scanned, laser-induced guide star and direct wavefront sensing allows high numerical aperture diffraction-limited imaging of fine dynamic structures deep in the intact living zebrafish brain.

The presence of male experimenters induces stress and stress-induced analgesia, affecting behavioral assays in mice.

Light-activated reversible inhibition by assembled trap (LARIAT) is a versatile optogenetic method for inactivating proteins, including GFP fusions, in living cells by conditional clustering at high spatiotemporal resolution.

Noise models based on the identification of major sources of technical variability in single-cell RNA-seq data allow the inference of true biological variability in cellular expression.

A reversible fluorescent protein complementation assay is reported for the study of protein interaction dynamics within living cells.

A graphical processing unit implementation of an efficient Bayesian-based multiview deconvolution method brings the resolution and contrast advantages of multiview deconvolution to more users of light-sheet fluorescence microscopy.

Graphene is in many ways an ideal sample support for cryo-electron microscopy, but its hydrophobicity prevents adsorption of protein from aqueous solution. Low-energy hydrogen-plasma treatment renders graphene hydrophilic and enables controlled adsorption of protein to its surface.

A two-step error correction process for high throughput–sequenced T- and B-cell receptors allows the elimination of most errors while not diminishing the natural complexity of the repertoires.

Raven calculates assembly plans for complex genetic constructs from thousands of parts. It integrates user feedback on failed intermediate assemblies to improve the final outcome.

Bone marrow formed in a cylindrical PDMS device implanted in a mouse can be surgically removed and cultured for a week in vitro without losing any of the hallmarks of in vivo bone marrow niches.

Movable volumetric three-dimensional multielectrode implants coupled to a modular headcap with wireless capabilities allow simultaneous recording of nearly 500 cortical neurons in freely behaving rhesus monkeys.

Experimental and analytical methods are described for in vivo single-molecule imaging of GFP-tagged proteins at the cell surface and are applied to the developing C. elegans embryo.

The high-throughput sequencing–RNA affinity profiling (HiTS-RAP) assay enables large-scale profiling of protein interactions with RNA libraries using a simple protocol on a high-throughput sequencer.

This framework for multiscale signal representation allows global analysis of genomic data at different length scales from base pairs to entire chromosomes and reveals the interplay of information encoded at different scales, such as the regulation of gene expression by methylation patterns that go beyond the single-gene scale.