Volume 9 Issue 9, September 2012

Musical microfluidics to watch and weigh growing cells

Three-dimensional visualizations are effective for spatial data but rarely for other data types.

A computer model of a bacterium accounts for gene function and predicts unexpected emergent properties.

Researchers describe an approach to zero in on post-translational modifications likely to have important regulatory functions.

Using a special nanochannel chip, genome maps can be constructed from single DNA molecules in any laboratory.

Bacterial proteins are used to rewire signaling pathways in yeast and mammalian cells.

Acoustic tweezers nudge cells or particles with sound waves.

Examining how proteins from tumor viruses affect their cellular targets helps researchers zero in on the human genes that drive cancer.

A 'neutralizer displacement assay' provides a general platform for electrochemistry-based sensing of any class of analyte molecule.

Single-molecule methods to apply and measure force and displacement are expanding mechanobiology.

New bioinformatics tools enable the recognition of neighboring amino acids in protein complexes.

Through a collaborative effort, engineers and neuroscientists have created a method, using electrospun nanofibers as surrogate neuronal axons, to piece together the complexities of myelination.

Many scholars claim there is a consensus on broad consent for biobanking. We analyzed the literature in PubMed and found no evidence for consensus. Public perception studies report mixed findings on consent, but many biobanks adopt broad consent. A belief in consensus may stem from knowledge of biobank consent practices.

In this perspective, the authors present the basic features of lens-free computational imaging tools and report performance comparisons with conventional microscopy methods. They also discuss the challenges that these computational on-chip microscopes face for their wide-scale biomedical application.

The mouse cancer model 'Multi-Hit' allows for the evaluation of oncogene cooperativities in tumor development based on stochastic Cre-recombination events. Cells with cooperating oncogenes are positively selected and give rise to tumors. The approach is used to study Ras downstream effector pathways in tumorigenesis.

xProphet, a tool using a target-decoy strategy, determines false discovery rate in mass-spectrometry data of chemically cross-linked peptides.

pLink, software for data analysis of cross-linked proteins coupled with mass spectrometry, estimates false discovery rate and enables analysis of protein complexes without extensive purification.

A combination of protein correlation profiling–stable isotope labeling by amino acids in cell culture and size-exclusion chromatography allows stoichiometric analysis of changes in the human interactome in response to a growth factor.

Precise mass measurement on single mammalian cells is combined with imaging to monitor changes in cellular mass during the cell cycle over many generations.

Gene synthesis is currently limited by the need to use error-prone oligonucleotide building blocks. Dial-out PCR overcomes the sequence verification bottleneck by using unique sequence tags and massively parallel sequencing to identify and selectively retrieve error-free DNA molecules of interest from complex mixtures.

Primary rat oligodendocytes were cultured in the presence of electron-spun nanofibers of varying sizes as a model to study myelination processes in the mammalian central nervous system. The authors study the role of fiber diameter on the initiation of concentric wrapping by oligodendrocytes.

A method is presented to model cell proliferation from tracked automated time-lapse imaging of cell populations. The resulting fractional proliferation graphs permit visualization of dynamic changes in the dividing and nondividing subsets of the population.