Commentary

This Commentary discusses the problem of phototoxicity in live imaging and suggests guidelines to improve its assessment and reporting.

This piece tackles the question of how to make biological scale more intuitive to human beings, bringing to bear the author's background in scientific visualization.

In this Commentary, Ascoli et al. discuss recipes for setting up public data sharing initiatives based on their experiences with NeuroMorpho.Org.

We convened an ad hoc International Working Group for Antibody Validation in order to formulate the best approaches for validating antibodies used in common research applications and to provide guidelines that ensure antibody reproducibility. We recommend five conceptual 'pillars' for antibody validation to be used in an application-specific manner.

Cryo-EM has emerged rapidly as a method for determining high-resolution structures of biological macromolecules. The author of this Commentary discusses just how much better this technology may get and how fast such developments are likely to happen.

A Commentary proposes that in order to improve statistical power in mass spectrometry–based proteomics data analysis, irrelevant peptides should be removed from the database prior to searching.

Quality control of cell lines used in biomedical research is essential to ensure reproducibility. Although cell line authentication has been widely recommended for many years, misidentification, including cross-contamination, remains a serious problem. We outline a multi-stakeholder, incremental approach and policy-related recommendations to facilitate change in the culture of cell line authentication.

Scientific animations have tremendous potential as instruments of insight and dissemination. However, audiences are often unable to determine the degree to which visualizations are informed by scientific evidence. By providing a more detailed account of source use, developers can increase the credibility of animations as scientific tools.

The reliability and reproducibility of science are under scrutiny. However, a major cause of this lack of repeatability is not being considered: the wide sample-to-sample variability in the P value. We explain why P is fickle to discourage the ill-informed practice of interpreting analyses based predominantly on this statistic.

Developments in electrical and optical recording technology are scaling up the size of neuronal populations that can be monitored simultaneously. Light-sheet imaging is rapidly gaining traction as a method for optically interrogating activity in large networks and presents both opportunities and challenges for understanding circuit function.

In light sheet–based fluorescence microscopy (LSFM), optical sectioning in the excitation process minimizes fluorophore bleaching and phototoxic effects. Because biological specimens survive long-term three-dimensional imaging at high spatiotemporal resolution, LSFM has become the tool of choice in developmental biology.

Ten years of development in light-sheet microscopy have led to spectacular demonstrations of its capabilities. The technology is ready to assist biologists in tackling scientific problems, but are biologists ready for it? Here we discuss the interdisciplinary challenges light-sheet microscopy presents for biologists and highlight available resources.

The ability to convert somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells has immense potential to further our understanding of development and disease mechanisms, and for cellular therapy. Before researchers can achieve these goals, they must expand current methodology to incorporate animal models and quantitative descriptions of the essential phenomena driving reprogramming.

A decade of advances in genome engineering technologies has enabled the editing of genome sequences much like one edits computer code; many more applications for precisely manipulating genome structure and function are on the horizon.

Our choice, among many candidates, of the ten areas of methods development with the most impact on biological research over the last decade. Visit Methagora to browse Nature Methods papers in some of these areas.