Autism spectrum disorder has attracted intense interest from the public and scientists over recent years. Nature sorts fact from fiction in this hot, but sometimes contentious, field: from the debate about soaring diagnoses, to the idea that scientists and engineers are at high risk of having a child with autism. The special includes news and comment fromNature, and articles fromNature Medicine,Nature NeuroscienceandNature Reviews Neuroscience.

We celebrate the 2011 International Year of Chemistry by highlighting the important contributions of chemistry to methods currently used in biology research. In a series of Commentaries, developers of chemistry-related tools and methods in three selected areas of research discuss their history and applications.

In a series of commissioned pieces, authors discuss methods for the analysis of single cells and consider technical developments still needed.

Flow cytometry has been an essential technique in modern biological research and the number and variety of applications using flow cytometers has been expanding rapidly. This collection of articles highlights recent methodological advances in the use of flow cytometry and the powerful new applications being developed.

Nature Methods' choice of Method of the Year 2010 is optogenetics for its capacity to control cell function with light. A series of articles and a video describe how optogenetics has revolutionized the way experiments are conducted in neuroscience and showcase the potential the method has for the study of many signaling pathways in cell biology. The special feature also discusses how technological development will be needed to expand the possibilities of optogenetics.

Fluorescence microscopy is acquiring new capabilities as methodological developments allow it to break the diffraction limit. This Collection of articles from several leaders in the field highlights the diversity of super-resolution microscopy techniques being developed and the principles that allow them to overcome this long-standing limitation.

A series of five commissioned Reviews discuss the challenges of visualizing biological data and the visualization tools available to biologists working with genomes, alignments and phylogenies, macromolecular structures, images and systems biology data.

Fluorescence microscopy is acquiring new capabilities as methodological developments allow it to break the diffraction limit. This collection of articles from several leaders in the field highlights the diversity of super-resolution microscopy techniques being developed and the principles that allow them to overcome this long-standing limitation.

Nature Methods' Method of the Year 2009 goes to induced pluripotency for its potential for biological discovery. This series of articles—and the related video—showcase how induced pluripotency is coming into its own in 2009 as a tool for discovery in both basic and disease biology and explore the incredible impact this area promises to have in biological research.

A commissioned Perspective discusses the strength and challenges of next-generation sequencing, and a series of commissioned Reviews explain the principles behind data-analysis software for important applications from alignment and assembly to structural-variant detection and the interpretation of ChIP-seq and RNA-seq data.

Nature Methodscelebrates its five year anniversary with commentaries discussing the impact and progress of methodological developments in the life sciences. We also include a fun selection of papers and covers from our pages.

Nature Methods' Method of the Year 2008 goes to super-resolution fluorescence microscopy. This series of articles—and the related movie—showcase how these novel imaging methods came into their own in 2008 and the incredible impact they promise to have in biological research.