News & Views in 2005

A Xenopus embryo coinjected with a plasmid encoding a transgene and the φC31 integrase mRNA readily facilitates genomic integration resulting in healthy transgenic embryos.

The pathogenic arsenal of many bacteria includes an apparatus that mediates the injection of a cocktail of virulence proteins directly into host cells. Spatiotemporal aspects of this process can now be analyzed in living cells.

Understanding neuronal integration comes a step closer to reality with the development of a crystal-based, beam-steering microscope for uncaging neurotransmitters, which will permit experimental interrogation of the spatiotemporal interactions between the thousands of synapses a neuron receives.

Since the 1970s, fluorescence recovery after photobleaching has advanced our understanding of cell membrane dynamics and cytoplasmic signaling pathways. This technique has now been applied in the nucleus to address questions in epigenetics and provides a useful new tool to develop pharmacotherapies for human disease.

The Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposon emerged as a useful tool for applications such as germline and somatic cell insertional mutagenesis and now shows its usefulness again by facilitating saturating germline mutagenesis in mice.

How sure can we be to have identified the right proteins in a large scale proteomics study with our mass spectrometric instrumentation? Can we expect valid data from the employed search algorithm(s)? Can we believe what our computer is telling us? Right questions—what are the answers?

In this issue a review and a protocol describe advances in applying amperometry to biology. Here we provide an overview of amperometry's origins and how it is used to examine the basics of exocytosis.

With the advent of microfluidics technology and the development of a user-friendly device, studying high-density colonies of microorganisms in controlled chemostatic conditions now becomes a reality.

Targeted genomic insertion will improve the qualitative and quantitative functional comparison of similar transgenes and provide suitable integration points for transgenes of applied interest.

Solution polymers such as dendrimers promise to provide valuable new tools for proteomics researchers using mass spectrometry (MS) to probe protein modifications.

The nonphototoxic nature of GFP makes it an excellent imaging probe but a poor tool for techniques that rely on generation of toxic radicals such as chromophore-assisted light inactivation (CALI). Multiphoton excitation helps overcome these limitations.

A carefully thought out method of harvesting and arraying tissue samples into blocks provides a simple but powerful way of reliably producing extremely large tissue microarrays using commonly available laboratory equipment.

An innovative genetic screen yields new insights into kinase active site structure, expanding the number of enzymes from this family addressable with chemical tools.

A new version of the reverse two-hybrid strategy is now available that uses mammalian cells and the reconstitution of the JAK/STAT pathway. This should broaden substantially the possibilities of identifying reagents that specifically dissociate protein-protein interactions.

Mass spectrometry is reaching new heights monitoring changes in protein folding that occur as a result of a phage infection that commandeers the host's protein-folding machinery.

Since the introduction of microarray technology into the biologist's arsenal, there have been concerns about the reproducibility of experimental results obtained using different microarray platforms. In this issue, three articles address this point, and show that with carefully designed and controlled experiments using standardized protocols and data analyses, reproducibility across platforms is much better than previously shown.

New fluorescent peptide–based reporters provide a means for following kinase activity in crude cell extracts.

Validation and comparison of previously unknown microRNA genes in related herpesviruses yielded several surprises, most notably in regard to viral evolution and microRNA biogenesis. An explosion of literature has recently appeared describing the identification and mechanism of action of microRNAs (miRNAs)—small RNA regulators of gene expression in plant and animal cells.

Introducing inhibitors of bone morphogenic proteins along with basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) into culture medium for human embryonic stem (ES) cells facilitates long-term maintenance of these cells in the pluripotent state, coming one step closer to the goal of a fully defined system for human ES cell (hESC) culture free of animal products.

Two different but complementary resonance energy transfer techniques present researchers with new tools to visualize ligand-mediated activation of G protein–coupled receptors in living cells.