News & Comment

Research with human embryos and embryo models, this year’s Method of the Year, can be fraught. In contrast, digital embryos could be studied, even perturbed, in computational what-happens-when experiments.

To large-scale projects and individual labs, long-read sequencing has delivered new vistas and long wish lists for this technology’s future.

Armed with a rapidly maturing toolbox for single-cell analysis, scientists are threading together multiple layers of omic data to assemble rich portraits of cellular identity and function.

Miniaturized, head-mounted fluorescent microscopes give researchers a clear view of neuronal activity as animals freely explore and interact with their surroundings.

Recent advances in cryo-electron microscopy are enabling researchers to solve protein structures at near-atomic resolutions, expanding the biological applicability of this technique. Michael Eisenstein reports.

Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy techniques are enabling researchers to achieve dynamic, long-term imaging and three-dimensional reconstruction of specimens ranging from single cells to whole embryos.

Single-cell genome and transcriptome sequencing methods are generating a fresh wave of biological insights into development, cancer and neuroscience. Kelly Rae Chi reports.

Analysis of a preselected group of proteins delivers more precise, quantitative, sensitive data to more biologists. Vivien Marx reports.

Precise ways to modify the genome arose from unexpected places. Monya Baker reports.

Optogenetics grows from an idea into a discipline. Monya Baker reports.

Now that the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells is becoming routine, researchers can get on to the more exciting prospect of using the cells to make discoveries in disease and basic biology. Monya Baker reports.

After a long period of measured development and a recent surge of technical advances driven by physicists, super-resolution fluorescence microscopy emerged in 2008 as a powerful tool for biologists. Kelly Rae Chi reports.

In 2007, the next-generation sequencing technologies have come into their own with an impressive array of successful applications. Kelly Rae Chi reports.