Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
They may be tiny, but microRNAs show strength in numbers and by exerting a surprising amount of influence over the expression of many genes. In the space of just a few years, the identification and analysis of microRNAs has become a boom industry, necessitating new tools and techniques suitable for such small targets. Michael Eisenstein reports.
Large-scale RNA interference (RNAi)-based analyses, very much as other 'omic' approaches, have inherent rates of false positives and negatives. The variability in the standards of care applied to validate results from these studies, if left unchecked, could eventually begin to undermine the credibility of RNAi as a powerful functional approach. This Commentary is an invitation to an open discussion started among various users of RNAi to set forth accepted standards that would insure the quality and accuracy of information in the large datasets coming out of genome-scale screens. Please visit methagora to view and post comments on this article
More and more scientists now see advantages in automating some of their more repetitive or error-prone tasks. Michael Eisenstein takes a look at systems that are helping to bring robotics into the academic and clinical research laboratory.