News & Comment

The ability to study single cells will permit a better understanding of cellular heterogeneity.

Will some single molecule sequencing strategies be able to deliver on the promise of direct methyl cytosine sequencing?

Automated methods to score phenotypes in model organisms continue to develop and will permit previously inaccessible areas of biology to be probed.

Technology for sensitively and reproducibly detecting targeted proteins by mass spectrometry picks up speed.

Refinements in methods to uncover the higher-order structure of the genome will allow functional insight into genomic architecture at high resolution.

Will new methods and an emerging understanding of the minimal requirements for cellular life be sufficient to construct a synthetic organism?

New methods to coax signals from unlabeled biological molecules may finally fulfill the promise of practical label-free microscopy with molecular specificity.

Methodological developments are opening the functioning brain to cellular-level investigation using light.

The ability to return mature body cells to a pluripotent state has wide-ranging potential as a tool for discovery in both disease and basic biology.

The field of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) will be subject to a wide range of laws and research ethics policies, many of which exist as a result of the controversies associated with research on human embryonic stem cells. Understanding this potentially complex regulatory environment will help iPSC research move forward and will inform future policy.

The discovery that it is possible to render somatic cells pluripotent by the exogenous expression of a set of transcription factors provides an experimental model for studying the molecular nature of cellular identity.

Now that the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells is becoming routine, researchers can get on to the more exciting prospect of using the cells to make discoveries in disease and basic biology. Monya Baker reports.

iPS cell technology makes patient- and disease-specific human cells widely available. While technical challenges still remain, the use of these tools will greatly expand our understanding of human disease.

Gold nanoparticles are used to monitor caspase activity at the single-molecule level in living cells.

Researchers observe that cells of the post-implantation mouse epiblast can revert to an embryonic stem cell–like state without the addition of exogenous genes.

New chemical microarrays capture a comprehensive snapshot of the various enzymatic activities contained within a biological sample.

An imaging platform based on stimulated emission helps researchers to lead nonfluorescent chromophores out of the shadows.