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  • Facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration is essential for the success of chemical biology.

    Editorial
  • Two proteins that together serve as a scaffold for iron-sulfur cluster assembly in the yeast cytosol have been identified, providing the first mechanistic insight into cytosolic cluster assembly.

    • Joan B Broderick
    News & Views
  • Simultaneous measurement of multiple analytes in high-throughput assays requires the design of integrated sensory elements. The latest development in this field is an engineering masterpiece based on microfluidics, photolithography and polymer science.

    • Hicham Fenniri
    • Ramon Alvarez-Puebla
    News & Views
  • Lysine methylation has been implicated in gene transcription and epigenetic control. Chemical modification of cysteine residues results in a highly similar structural and functional analog of methylated lysine and provides a means to study this important modification in nucleosomes.

    • Monica Bhatia
    • Paul R Thompson
    News & Views
  • Quantitative detection of H2O2, which is increasingly recognized as an intracellular messenger, remains a challenge for cell biologists. The development of molecular probes that fluoresce upon H2O2-mediated removal of a boronate-based protecting group, rather than upon nonspecific oxidation, demonstrates that this challenge is not insurmountable.

    • Sue Goo Rhee
    News & Views
  • A chemical-genetic study indicates that modulation of neurotransmitter signaling affects the self-renewal capacity of neural stem cells in culture. Although the mechanisms of action are not resolved, the research points to a potential therapeutic target class for treatment of brain tumors.

    • Mark Mercola
    News & Views
  • Scientific endeavors benefit from transparency and open declarations of real or perceived conflicts of interest.

    Editorial
  • The Broad Institute was founded with the vision of creating a truly collaborative biomedical research environment, and small molecules are a central focus.

    • Joanne Kotz
    Elements
  • Just when we thought that all of the interesting biochemical cofactors have been identified, a new metabolite consisting of thiamine and ATP has been isolated from a number of organisms.

    • Frank Jordan
    News & Views
  • FNR is a global regulator of the Escherichia coli aerobic-anaerobic growth transition and relies on an [Fe-S] cluster cofactor to control its oxygen-dependent activity. Details of the chemical reaction of oxygen with the [Fe-S] cluster reveal how this cofactor is used for oxygen sensing.

    • F Wayne Outten
    News & Views
  • Synthetic oligopeptides chemically modified with environmentally sensitive fluorophores enable real-time visualization of peptide binding to MHC molecules. This technology will expand our understanding of antigen presentation and enable visualization of fluorescent peptide binding to a wide variety of receptors in living cells.

    • Jonathan W Yewdell
    • Avital Lev
    News & Views
  • Guanine-rich quadruplex-forming sequences within DNA and RNA are prevalent and are suspected of regulating telomere replication, transcription and pre-mRNA splicing. The recent discovery of quadruplex-forming sequences in the 5′ untranslated regions of various proto-oncogenes suggests an important role for such sequences in inhibition of mRNA translation.

    • Bruce A Armitage
    News & Views