News & Comment

Trial, error and the art of optimizing 'molecular rulers' that sense molecules or interactions.

X-ray beams at 27,000 pulses per second promise high-resolution views of macromolecules.

Coaxing ancient DNA to reveal its history delivers surprises and even improves ways of working with badly damaged present-day DNA.

Carbohydrates are tough molecules to study, but glycoscientists are developing and democratizing the needed tools.

3D human cell cultures are changing the way scientists model organ development and function—but they have their own set of complications.

PCR duplicates—sequencing reads from the same original genomic fragment—can cause headaches. But there are remedies.

Many possibilities for parsing cancer emerge when labs combine gene editing and screens. And RNAi retains its spot in the menu of options.

The tools that clock a cell's everyday affairs reveal plenty that's out of the ordinary.

Efforts to pare away cellular genomes are yielding streamlined biosynthetic factories and deeper insights into the core processes of biology.

Sequencing technology drives microbiology and gives researchers new reasons to draw on classic techniques.

A maturing open hardware and open-source software movement seeks to expand DIY light-sheet microscopy.

Many neuroscience labs are intrigued by these social, vocalizing primates.

DNA folding shapes gene expression. Emerging techniques promise to reveal the intricacies of this architectural language of chromosomes.

Labs can generate neurons from pluripotent stem cells to study basic biology and to model disease. Protocols are getting more robust, and labs add personal preferences.

Cell-based assays are less routine for plant biologists than for researchers who work with animal or human cells, but that is changing.

Infidelity is painful in life and in the lab. The former is better left to other publications; the latter is best not ignored, especially in the context of PCR-based DNA amplification.

Tools are emerging to help labs trawl for sequences that reveal microbial strains and their functional potential in deep pools of metagenomic data.

Emerging ways to lower the error rate when hunting low-frequency mutations.

Probes and imaging finesse for a clearer view of tissue.