News & Comment

From a physicist who explores biology’s unknowns, greater precision by linking two methods.

Most research aiming at understanding the molecular foundations of life and disease has focused on a limited set of increasingly well-known proteins while the biological functions of many others remain poorly understood. We propose to form the Understudied Protein Initiative with the objective of reducing the annotation gap by systematically associating uncharacterized proteins with proteins of known function, thereby laying the groundwork for future detailed mechanistic studies.

Here we discuss barriers to reproducibility in regard to microscopes and related hardware, along with best practices for sharing novel designs created using computer-aided design (CAD). We hope to start a fruitful community discussion on how instrument development, especially in microscopy, can become more open and reproducible, ultimately leading to better, more trustworthy science.

Scientists in Ukraine share their current reality and post-war plans.

Building a sustainable open source toolbox to track social behavior and how to get in the zone.

Long-read proteogenomics helps delineate isoform diversity in full-length proteins.

Single-nuclei isoform RNA sequencing enables cell-type specific isoform analysis in frozen brain samples.

Evolutionary trees link ancient and modern human genomes.

Embryogram allows stress measurements during migration of the lateral line primordium in zebrafish embryos.

A lensless microscope captures 3D fluorescence images of complex biological tissues.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of methodological advancements in basic biological research. We believe that method development will continue to propel both fundamental and applied studies on SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens.

Interactions between carbohydrates and the proteins that bind them (lectins) are often some of the first between a host cell and a viral invader. With its highly glycosylated spike protein, SARS-CoV-2 is no exception. Interrogating glycosylation is vital to understand viral infection, yet it has been a challenge. Improvement in methods ranging from mass spectrometry to glycan arrays and modeling simulations are yielding atomic-level information about the glycans that decorate viruses and host cells alike.

This Comment discusses the main animal models that have had a key role in our understanding of the immune and viral dynamics of SARS-CoV-2.

Critical technological advances have enabled the rapid investigations into the immune responses elicited by SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss the cutting-edge methods used to deconvolve the B-cell responses against this virus and the impact they have had in the ongoing public health crisis.

High-resolution structural information is critical for rapid development of vaccines and therapeutics against emerging human pathogens. Structural biology methods have been at the forefront of research on SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. These technologies will continue to be powerful tools to fend off future public health threats.

Against the backdrop of its many battles with infectious disease, the Global South applies networking and creative grit to face COVID-19.

We asked scientists around the globe for their views on the basic research methods, tools and resources needed to fight future emerging pathogenic threats.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, genomics and bioinformatics have emerged as essential public health tools. The genomic data acquired using these methods have supported the global health response, facilitated the development of testing methods and allowed the timely tracking of novel SARS-CoV-2 variants. Yet the virtually unlimited potential for rapid generation and analysis of genomic data is also coupled with unique technical, scientific and organizational challenges. Here, we discuss the application of genomic and computational methods for efficient data-driven COVID-19 response, the advantages of the democratization of viral sequencing around the world and the challenges associated with viral genome data collection and processing.