Volume 11 Issue 8, August 2014

From the netherworld between biology and chemistry comes a new method that leverages both fields and delivers acceleration to chromatin biochemistry.

Complex relationships demand trade-offs.

Methods to label proteins with carbon nanotubes permit the study of intracellular movement at different timescales.

A combination of experimental protein analysis and imaging techniques is used to create a three-dimensional model of a synaptic bouton.

A simple reporter tracks kinase activity in a living cell.

Silver-based nanoparticles in combination with an etching procedure facilitate the analysis of cellular internalization processes.

Genome engineering skews the sex ratio of malaria-carrying mosquitoes heavily toward males and leads to a population crash.

Managing, sharing and controlling the quality of plasmids can be simple. But many techniques to disseminate them do not scale, which leads nonprofits and companies to explore new options.

Barcoded semisynthetic nucleosomes combined with massively parallel sequencing provide an innovative new platform for analyzing the histone-recognition and histone-modifying activities of chromatin-associated proteins.

This Perspective discusses the power of large mutational scans for the study of protein properties, the analytical challenges posed by the resulting data sets and the potential of this approach to further our understanding of human genetic variation.

12 microRNA expression profiling platforms are compared for their reproducibility, sensitivity, accuracy and specificity, and the strengths and weaknesses of each platform are discussed.

Single-cell bisulfite sequencing (scBS-seq) allows robust DNA methylation analysis in rare cells and heterogeneous populations.

This paper describes immunocompromised rag2 mutant zebrafish, which allow efficient and robust cell transplantations in adult zebrafish, thereby facilitating stem cell, cancer and regeneration research.

A combination of a sensitive blue light–gated channelrhodopsin actuator and red-shifted Arch-based voltage sensors allows all-optical electrophysiology without cross-talk in cultured neurons or brain slices.

A synthetic library of nucleosomes, each with a DNA-barcode characteristic for a defined post-translational modification (PTM), is used to probe PTM-based recruitment and modulation of histone mark readers and writers.

Ligand nanocalipers made using DNA nanotechnology are used to display ephrin-A5 at well-defined spatial intervals to study how nanoscale ligand spacing affects EphA2 receptor activation in breast cancer cells.

This paper demonstrates that micropatterned human embryonic stem cell colonies can acquire spatial patterns reminiscent of those in the embryo and proposes their use to study early developmental processes in the human system.

A simple, robust, chemically defined method for generating cardiomyocytes from human pluripotent stem cells is described. It should enable the identification of conditions for maturation of these cells.

A tetramethylrhodamine-labeled dimer of the cell-penetrating peptide TAT, named dfTAT, efficiently delivers proteins into live cells by facilitating endosomal escape.

The results of genome-wide association studies are combined with quantitative interaction proteomics to narrow down the list of putative causal disease genes and filter modest association signals.