Volume 17 Issue 12, December 2020

A soccer striker and his ion channel rescue tools.

Technological advances push the limits of single-particle cryo-EM to achieve atomic resolution.

High-density microelectrode arrays with dual-mode capabilities can ‘image’ electrical activity in neuronal cultures or slice preparations.

RNA timestamps are molecular recorders that enable one to infer the age of an RNA molecule and record transcriptional activity in a temporal manner.

CRISPR, now a Nobel-Prize-winning technology, comes in many flavors. And so do gRNAs.

This work repurposes the Type I-C Cascade–Cas3 system from Pseudomonas aeruginosa to achieve large deletions in bacterial genomes.

Using nanopore sequencing as readout, nanoNOMe–seq enables chromosome-level allele-specific profiles of CpG methylation and chromatin accessibility on human cells, in which the chromatin accessibility is profiled through exogenous GpC methylation introduced by a GpC methyltransferase.

MARS uses a meta-learning strategy for annotating known cell types and identifying novel ones across single-cell RNA-seq datasets.

INTRIGUE is a statistical framework based on the directional consistency criterion for quantifying and controlling reproducibility in high-throughput experiments.

Membrane proteins exhibit spatial variation in rigidity and disorder, which poses a challenge for traditional cryo-EM reconstruction algorithms. Non-uniform refinement accounts for this spatial variability, yielding improved 3D reconstruction quality even for small membrane proteins.

Direct infusion–shotgun proteome analysis (DI-SPA) using data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry (DIA-MS) achieves fast and reproducible results by omitting the liquid-chromatography fractionation step and directly performing gas-phase peptide fractionation by ion mobility.

diaPASEF makes use of the correlation between the ion mobility and the m/z of peptides to trap and release precursor ions in a TIMS-TOF mass spectrometer for an almost complete sampling of the precursor ion beam with data-independent acquisition.

A computational tool, Avant-garde, automates refinement of data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics data.

Engineered deubiquitinases (enDUBs) use nanobodies to bring deubiquitinases to target proteins for selective ubiquitin chain removal. enDUBs can rescue the functional expression of mutant ion channels like those responsible for cystic fibrosis.

BAcTrace is a predominantly retrograde tracing tool for connectomic analyses in Drosophila.

Simultaneous widefield calcium imaging and fMRI provide insight into neural activity at multiple scales and can be used to decipher the cellular origin of BOLD activity.