Reviews & Analysis

With a combination of microscopic and computational methods, the lineage of cells produced by divisions in the meristems of growing plants can now be tracked over time.

Simplified methods to map transcription start sites allow the exploration of transcription-initiation landscapes in rare cell types.

New technical feats make it possible to monitor the activity of identified neurons in awake behaving Drosophila melanogaster.

Measuring the kinetics of nucleotide incorporation during single-molecule, real-time DNA sequencing allows identification of methylated bases during the sequencing process.

Assessing changes in facial expression may enable us to assess pain in animals more accurately and more effectively.

The arsenal of methods to investigate gene function in Caenorhabditis elegans continues to grow—with new approaches to generate targeted deletion mutants and to control gene expression.

Improved and easy-to-implement methods for precise fitting of curves to Poisson-distributed data—such as photons from single emitters—reach the limits of fitting precision.

The super-SILAC approach facilitates the quantitative analysis of human tumor tissue proteomes.

Silicon-based microscales allow real-time measurements of the growth rate of single cells and open up interesting perspectives for the study of mass biogenesis at the cellular level.

Tracking the spatiotemporal dynamics of bacterial effectors injected into single living host cells has become possible with a split GFP–based method.

Stochastic profiling, a method to rank heterogeneity of gene expression in a cell population, shows that quantifying cell-to-cell variability has come of age and leads to biological insight.

The introduction of new and accurate force fields for atom-atom interactions into the Rosetta framework allows the recovery of native-like RNA structures.

Prospective isolation of defined cell types is a crucial prerequisite for their molecular analysis, but the heterogeneity of populations yielded by current protocols obscures relevant information. New studies now use additional features from time-resolved imaging data for live prospective identification of cells with defined future behavior.

Mosaic analysis in zebrafish (MAZe) allows lineage tracing and analysis of mosaic animals.

A new amyloid-prediction tool, Waltz, offers advantages over previous amyloid-prediction tools for distinguishing 'true' amyloids from amorphous aggregates.