Volume 17 Issue 3, March 2022

Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) can be used in combination with functional MRI (fMRI) to study brain functions. This Consensus Statement provides a checklist for reporting concurrent tES-fMRI research.

When cells are grown in or on a biomaterial, they continue to produce a natural extracellular matrix (ECM). This protocol describes the analysis of nascent ECM proteins using metabolic labeling, click chemistry, confocal microscopy and mass spectrometry.

An approach to studying epithelia derived from organoids of either fetal or adult state and from both the small intestine and colon via transplantation into animals in which the colon has been damaged following administration of dextran sulfate sodium.

Screening chemical databases by computational docking is prohibitively time consuming when the databases are very large. Deep docking is a deep-learning approach aimed at reducing the number of compounds that need to be docked.

Structural studies of GPCRs are limited by difficulties in obtaining well-diffracting crystals. This protocol describes how to generate and screen for mutants with better thermal stability that is indicative for successful crystallization in lipidic cubic phase.

Carbon nanotubes are modified by introducing quantum defects with functional handles into the carbon lattice. The functionalization preserves their near-infrared fluorescence and enables covalent bioconjugation and peptide synthesis.

Tao et al. present the synthesis and characterization of siRNA-loaded polymer–lipid hybrid nanoparticles for targeted delivery to macrophages. The nanoparticles are used to silence CaMKIIγ activity in a mouse model of atherosclerosis.

The authors provide a versatile gene therapy approach that is mutation- and gene size–independent, using dCas9-VPR–based transcriptional activation of functionally equivalent genes. They show how to apply this for gene therapy for inherited retinal dystrophies in mice as an example.

Carbohydrates, proteins and nucleic acids in cultured cells and thick tissues are fluorescently labeled via FLARE for cleared-tissue or expansion microscopy.

VerCINI (vertical cell imaging by nanostructured immobilization) is a method that enables high-resolution imaging of bacterial cell features, such as protein dynamics, in cells oriented vertically in traps made from a nanofabricated mold.

Guanine-rich RNAs folded into G-quadruplex structures (G4-RNAs) are captured from cross-linked RNA using a G4-specific chemical probe, BioTASQ, and mapped globally by sequencing.

Human pluripotent stem cells are grown in a physically confined area (‘spot’) and efficiently differentiated into a highly enriched population of healthy and functional midbrain dopamine progenitors and midbrain dopamine neurons.

The authors describe how to make both a gut-on-a-chip and a hybrid chip with a Transwell insert, and how to induce 3D morphogenesis of human intestinal epithelium from either Caco-2 cells or organoids using basolateral medium flow in both platforms.