Reviews & Analysis

Potent and easily produced custom zinc-finger nucleases will be game-changers for the field, at a time when the field itself is changing.

Microarrays made from naturally expressed glycolipids help winnow function from heterogeneous glycan structures.

Stabilization with a suction window permits in vivo imaging of the mouse lung vasculature with video-rate two-photon microscopy.

A brief description of the basic steps required to control cellular function with optogenetics is presented.

The most abundant proteins in our cells are there to generate mechanical forces, and measurement of these forces has just become possible.

Novel deep-sequencing strategies are used to monitor, at the genomic scale, the structure of cellular RNAs using enzymatic probing.

Synthetic surfaces displaying a glycosaminoglycan-binding peptide derived from vitronectin support long-term culture of human pluripotent stem cells.

Retroviral marking of single human embryonic stem cells shows that cultures of these cells contain subpopulations with distinct functional properties.

Automation and optimization of DNA construction results in the efficient production of large target sequences.

Transfer of the light-activated cation channel channelrhodopsin-2 gene enables optical control of heart muscle membrane potential.

Optogenetic stimulation by ultrashort laser pulses could allow neural circuits in the living brain to be probed with cellular resolution, despite pervasive light scattering. Now sophisticated new multiphoton stimulation systems that strike a better balance between lateral and axial resolution help realize this potential by matching the illumination volume to the soma's dimensions.

A software tool based on gene model profiling improves analysis of alternative splice events in RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data.

A targeted mass spectrometry method, selected reaction monitoring, is applied to validate predicted microRNA targets in Caenorhabditis elegans.

The technical toolkit for Caenorhabditis elegans expands to include experimental selection using antibiotic resistance genes.

Arrays of microposts of different heights generate substrates with different flexibility, on which cells can be grown.

Oxygen concentrations in the rodent brain are revealed at a microscopic scale by measuring the lifetime of two photon–excited phosphorescence.

Mutations that increase the dynamic range of a photoswitchable protein may be used to improve other such photoswitches and increase their potential for allosteric control of protein activity in live cells.

Two methods describing gene expression and chromatin profiling of small cell numbers make progress toward achieving comprehensive integrated molecular views of defined cell populations.

A platform for automated screening of zebrafish larvae in high throughput should allow detection of phenotypic changes in single cells.