Volume 18 Issue 5, May 2021

Polymer physics, comparing ways to assess chromatin structure and taking in tales at the Italian seaside.

Biocurators, the backbone of the wwPDB, manage structural biology data deposition, quality, and integrity, and provide integral support to the research community worldwide.

The future of macromolecular crystallography includes new X-ray sources, enhanced remote-accessible capabilities and time-resolved methods to capture intermediate structures along reaction pathways.

It is time for structural biologists to embrace the challenge of quantitatively describing functional energy landscapes.

Many challenges and considerations must be evaluated when expanding and supporting new cryo-electron microscopy facilities.

Advances in cryo-EM technology will open a new era of RNA-only 3D structure determination.

Interest in cryo-ET is rapidly growing, but many technical challenges still require solutions.

Cryo-ET, which yields both structural and spatial information, will help unlock the molecular architecture of cells.

Computational protein modeling rapidly advances structural knowledge of viral proteins, but methods for modeling protein complexes still need improvement.

Whole-cell models, still in the early stages of development, are poised to open the next frontier in integrative modeling.

Integrative structural biology, the culmination of experimental and theoretical methods, will provide a holistic view of molecular processes.

Fusions of human and chimp iPS cells help study how divergence in gene expression affects phenotypic traits.

Two independent teams have developed the first in vitro human blastocysts.

The Cell-TALKING technique probes DNA modifications around a histone modification in fixed cells.

Photonic resonator interferometric scattering microscopy offers label-free imaging of biomolecules in vitro with improved signal-to-noise ratio.

Phased genomes from diverse human populations are assembled using multiple sequencing technologies.

With grit, urgency and creativity, scientists address the puzzle of long-haul COVID.

With protein structure prediction recently getting a seismic boost in accuracy, hopes are also up to better predict unstructured protein regions that can adopt diverse conformations. CAID, a community effort to revive systematic benchmarking, should help.

A study applies polymer physics to assess the advantages and limitations of three sequencing-based approaches for determining the structure of genomes and genomic domains.

CEPT, a small-molecule cocktail, improves the viability of human pluripotent stem cells, protects cells during culture and cryopreservation, and promotes in vitro differentiation and organoid formation.

Light-field microscopes can image three-dimensional dynamics of biological samples at unprecedented speed, but the computational reconstruction necessary for image formation is artifact-prone and time-consuming. Deep learning closes this gap between imaging and reconstruction speed.

A new approach tracks animal movements in 3D from multiple camera views using volumetric triangulation, reconciling occlusions and ambiguities present in any one camera view.

The quality of structural data obtained in cryo-EM is affected by multiple factors pertaining to sample preparation. This Review discusses available techniques and current challenges.

Results are presented from the first Critical Assessment of protein Intrinsic Disorder prediction (CAID) experiment, a community-based blind test to determine the state of the art in predicting intrinsically disordered regions in proteins.

This Analysis reports a computational approach to implement Hi-C, SPRITE and GAM, which allows researchers to assess the performances of the three technologies to capture DNA contacts in chromatin three-dimensional models.

This work describes nanodisco, a tool for de novo identifying DNA methylation in bacterial species and microbiomes using nanopore sequencing and for performing metagenomic binning using microbial DNA methylation patterns.

This work describes the identification of Cas13 proteins from two families by mining public metagenomic data. The newly identified Cas13X.1 shows efficient target knockdown and can be used to degrade SARS-CoV-2 and H1N1 genomes. In addition, the truncated Cas13X.1 offers an advantage in generating mini-RNA base editors.

Surveying targets by APOBEC-mediated profiling identifies binding sites of RBPs by C-to-U RNA editing. STAMP is isoform specific, can be multiplexed and enables detection of ribosome association in single cells.

PCprophet combines complex-level scoring and machine learning to predict novel protein complexes from protein cofractionation mass spectrometry data and to perform differential analysis across experimental conditions.

The CEPT cocktail comprising four small molecules enhances pluripotent stem cell survival, biobanking, organoid formation, and single-cell cloning efficiency by reducing cellular stress.

Phasor S-FLIM combines novel electronics for multichannel fluorescence lifetime acquisition and a phasor-based unmixing algorithm for real-time analysis of reliable spectral lifetime imaging data, enabling new biological observations.

Reconstruction of light-field microscopy data with a deep-learning network achieves high reconstruction speed and reduces artifacts, as illustrated for moving C. elegans and beating zebrafish hearts.

A deep learning–based algorithm enables efficient reconstruction of light-field microscopy data at video rate. In addition, concurrently acquired light-sheet microscopy data provide ground truth data for training, validation and refinement of the algorithm.

DANNCE enables robust 3D tracking of animals’ limbs and other features in naturalistic environments by making use of a deep learning approach that incorporates geometric reasoning. DANNCE is demonstrated on behavioral sequences from rodents, marmosets, and chickadees.