Primers and PrimeViews

This PrimeView highlights best practices for psychometric network analysis. Network topology types are discussed in relation to the type of data being collected.

Network analysis allows the investigation of complex patterns and relationships by examining nodes and the edges connecting them. Borsboom et al. discuss the adoption of network analysis in psychological research.

This PrimeView describes a strategic workflow for studying N₂ activation methods, emphasizing the importance of verifying genuine product formation.

This Primer highlights the range of new strategies for sustainable N₂ activation and the step by step protocol necessary for evaluating genuine activity. The required metrics and how to interpret data alongside the best practices to improve reproducibility and enable the development of practical technologies are discussed.

This PrimeView highlights the information on ubiquitin-like modifications and their protein targets that can be derived using proteomic techniques.

This Primer discusses approaches for characterizing ubiquitin-like proteins (UBLs), their targets and modification sites, and dynamic changes in modifications. The authors cover techniques for enriching modified proteins and mass spectrometry analysis strategies and workflows, describe how these techniques have been applied and outline how limitations are being addressed by new techniques.

This PrimeView on atom probe tomography accompanies the Primer by Gault et al. and highlights the three-dimensional nature of this nanometre-scale compositional mapping technique.

This Primer on atom probe tomography introduces the fundamentals of the technique and its experimental set-up, describes recent developments in specimen preparation, highlights aspects of data reconstruction and analysis, and showcases various applications of atom probe tomography in the materials sciences, geosciences and biological sciences.

This PrimeView highlights the steps involved in designing experiments for cell free gene expression. This technique has many benefits that make it suitable for a wide range of applications.

Cell-free gene expression is useful for expressing proteins with post-translational modifications, with special folding requirements and whose expression is difficult in prokaryotic systems. Garenne et al. outline the best practices for the expression of proteins in a cell-free environment.

This PrimeView describes novel fluorination and fluoroalkylation techniques and the key considerations for their use, and highlights the range of applications for fluorinated molecules in society.

This Primer describes contemporary fluorination and fluoroalkylation reactions in chemical synthesis. The authors describe the main fluorination and fluoroalkylation reactions. The many applications of these reactions in pharmaceuticals, imaging agents and agriculture are discussed, along with the history and future of synthetic organofluorine chemistry.

This PrimeView describes the factors that need to be considered when developing a biocatalyst and how they impact the utility of these enzymes in real-world applications.

In this Primer, Flitsch and colleagues describe how biocatalysis is facilitating synthetic chemistry in both academia and industry. Detailed considerations required to find, select and optimize a biocatalyst are described, followed by an analysis of the performance metrics used to define a good industrial catalyst.

This PrimeView highlights the underlying mechanisms of C–H activation and the utility of this synthetic manifold across applications such as polymers synthesis and drug discovery.

This Primer provides an overview of the best practices for C–H activation as well as key advances in asymmetric, photoinduced and electrocatalytic-mediated catalysis for this synthetic platform. An overview of how C–H activation facilitates the synthesis of molecules such as structurally complex (bio)polymers and drugs is provided along with the current challenges and priorities for the next decade.

This PrimeView highlights how electrochemical impedance spectroscopy is used to study the mechanisms of electrochemical reactions across different applications.

This Primer on electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) provides an experimental design guide to measure impedance and how these data are analysed. The range of applications that require EIS, from measuring battery performance to electrochemical biosensors, is highlighted. Limitations of the method along with emerging trends in experimental optimizations and data interpretation are also described.

This PrimeView highlights the key steps for reconstructing a super-resolution image from single-molecule localization data.

This Primer explains the central concepts of single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) before discussing experimental considerations regarding fluorophores, optics and data acquisition, processing and analysis. The Primer further describes recent high-impact discoveries made by SMLM techniques and concludes by discussing emerging methodologies.