Volume 13 Issue 1, January 2016

The connection between snowboarding and getting more data from protein crystals.

Apply visual grouping principles to add clarity to information flow in pathway diagrams.

Ultrafast ultrasound microscopy allows for super-resolution ultrasound imaging of vasculature in whole organs.

Engineered Jedi T cells scour the body to eliminate GFP-expressing cells.

Increasing the sensitivity of DNase-seq allows chromatin accessibility to be profiled from very low numbers of cells.

A map of mammalian protein interactions highlights the importance of substoichiometric interactions.

Cells are under mechanical tension in their native environment. New genetically encoded tension sensors can make a broader range of these forces visible.

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.

A brief overview of how to solve a macromolecular structure using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM).

Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has emerged over the last two decades as a technique capable of studying the structure of challenging systems. The author of this Commentary discusses some of the major historical landmarks in cryo-EM that have led to its present success.

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.

Better protein-labeling strategies will improve imaging.

New approaches are needed to see the dynamics of 3D chromatin structure at high resolution and throughput.

Advances in time-resolved crystallography make it possible to follow ever more rapid protein structural changes.

Optogenetic manipulation of neurons at cellular resolution holds promise for the dissection of neural microcircuitry.

Methods for imaging multiple targets in a single cell are breaking the color barrier.

New computational tools learn complex motifs from large sequence data sets.

Methods to systematically map the distribution of proteins in cells are evolving.

Integrated molecular profiles of single cells will provide mechanistic insights into gene regulation and heterogeneity.

New approaches expand the range and size of materials that can be inserted into a cell.

This review describes methods for increasing the activity and accuracy of the CRISPR-Cas9 system and discusses approaches for assessing off-target cleavage.

NeuroGPS-Tree can reconstruct individual neurons from dense populations of fluorescently labeled neurons using computational strategies inspired by the strategies humans use.

Parmbsc1, a new force field for DNA simulations, was broadly tested on nearly 100 DNA systems and overcame simulation artifacts that affected previous force fields.

A concentric-flow microfluidic electrokinetic sample injector enables efficient delivery of microcrystals in their mother liquor for serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography with minimal sample consumption.

Genotype Query Tools allows fast individual-centric indexing and mining of large variant data sets.

Combining a reversibly photoswitchable bacteriophytochrome with photoacoustic imaging allows for exceptionally sensitive tomographic imaging deep in living mice, as well as super-resolution photoacoustic microscopy.

Pooling barcoded 3C libraries and simultaneously capturing interactions at many loci of interest generates reproducible cis- and trans-interaction maps at high resolution from low amounts of input material. This allows for the comparison of interactions in different cell types using common software designed for differential analysis of sequence count data, rather than requiring software specifically designed for 3C experiments.

Addition of a glycan precursor to cells results in the synthesis and secretion of a large variety of O-glycans that can be purified and biochemically analyzed to profile the cellular O-glycome.

The Fixed and Recovered Intact Single-cell RNA (FRISCR) method enables robust RNA extraction and sequencing from fixed, stained and sorted single cells and allows unprecedented profiling of rare cell types, including two subpopulations of radial glial cells in the developing human cortex.

Quantitative analysis of promoter-repressor pairs in plants will allow the design of predictable gene circuits in multicellular organisms.