Biological techniques articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Jurors can be influenced by mitigating circumstances when deciding on sentences for committed crimes. Yamadaet al. show that feelings of sympathy created by mitigating circumstances activate moral conflict regions of the brain that predict individual differences in the severity of the sentence.

    • Makiko Yamada
    • , Colin F. Camerer
    •  & Hidehiko Takahashi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pulsed infrared laser light can directly stimulate nerves and muscles, but the underlying biophysical mechanism has remained enigmatic. This study reveals that infrared pulses depolarize target cells by reversibly altering the electrical capacitance of the plasma membrane.

    • Mikhail G. Shapiro
    • , Kazuaki Homma
    •  & Francisco Bezanilla

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Intracellular temperature mapping has not previously been achieved. Now, a fluorescent polymeric thermometer has been developed that can be used in combination with fluorescence-lifetime imaging microscopy to allow thermometry with spatial and temperature resolutions of 200 nm and 0.18–0.58 ° C.

    • Kohki Okabe
    • , Noriko Inada
    •  & Seiichi Uchiyama

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Algae show much promise in the production of biofuels owing to their high photoautotrophic biomass and lipid production rates. In this study, the draft genome ofNannochloropsis gaditanaCCMP526 and a method for the transformation of this alga are reported, facilitating the investigation of lipid synthesis and biofuel production.

    • Randor Radakovits
    • , Robert E. Jinkerson
    •  & Matthew C. Posewitz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The influenza A virus genome consists of eight RNA segments, which permits genetic reassortment and contributes to the emergence of novel strains with pandemic potential. Here, electron tomography is used to study the three-dimensional structure of ribonucleoprotein complexes within progeny virions.

    • Takeshi Noda
    • , Yukihiko Sugita
    •  & Yoshihiro Kawaoka

  • Article |

    A dual-contrast agent has been developed for combined ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging. This agent uses vaporization for ultrasound contrast enhancement and photoacoustic signal generation, providing significantly higher signals than thermal expansion, the most commonly used photoacoustic mechanism.

    • Katheryne Wilson
    • , Kimberly Homan
    •  & Stanislav Emelianov

  • Article |

    Multivalent display of integrin antagonists enhances their efficacy, but current synthetic scaffolds used to display ligands are limited in range and precision. Englundet al. develop a new scaffold to study the multivalent effects of integrin antagonists across wide ranges of ligand number, density, and 3D arrangement.

    • Ethan A. Englund
    • , Deyun Wang
    •  & Daniel H. Appella

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Albumin transport proteins circulate in the blood and are protected from degradation by interaction with the neonatal Fc receptor. Andersenet al. investigate the albumin binding site of the neonatal Fc receptor and find pH sensitive ionic networks at the binding interface.

    • Jan Terje Andersen
    • , Bjørn Dalhus
    •  & Inger Sandlie

  • Article |

    Surface characterization of soft materialsin situis challenging due to the importance of non-covalent interactions. Now, a new chemical imaging method is reported that generates images of surface interactions by combining many molecular probe trajectories.

    • Robert Walder
    • , Nathaniel Nelson
    •  & Daniel K. Schwartz

  • Article |

    Ampullary organs are involved in electroreception, but whether these are derived from placodes, thickened ectoderm, is unclear. In this study, the ampullary organs of the primitive ray-finned fish,Polyodon spathula, are shown to develop from lateral line placodes, suggesting that this is the ancestral state in bony fishes.

    • Melinda S. Modrell
    • , William E. Bemis
    •  & Clare V.H. Baker

  • Article |

    The generation of human cell lines using somatic cell nuclear transfer has been difficult to achieve. In this study, Egliet al. show that while mouse eggs reprogram somatic cells within hours, human eggs arrest after nuclear transfer which may be due to a lack of genome transcription.

    • Dieter Egli
    • , Alice E. Chen
    •  & Kevin Eggan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the genetics and physiology of domesticated species is important for crop improvement. By studying natural variation and the phenotypic traits of 413 diverse accessions of rice, Zhao et al. identify many common genetic variants that influence quantitative traits such as seed size and flowering time.

    • Keyan Zhao
    • , Chih-Wei Tung
    •  & Susan R. McCouch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The appearance of a new intron that splits an exon without disrupting the corresponding peptide sequence is a rare event in vertebrate genomes. Hellstenet al.demonstrate that, under certain circumstances, a functional intron can be produced in a single step by segmental genomic duplication.

    • Uffe Hellsten
    • , Julie L. Aspden
    •  & Daniel S. Rokhsar

  • Article |

    Modern female horses are genetically diverse but male horses are relatively homogenous. Lippoldet al. sequence the Y chromosome of nine ancient horses and detect diversity in the ancestral paternal lineage, demonstrating ancient Y-chromosomal DNA sequencing can provide insights into evolution.

    • Sebastian Lippold
    • , Michael Knapp
    •  & Michael Hofreiter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Polo-like kinase 1 is a key regulator of mitosis and is a candidate for drug development to treat cancer. Here, reduced expression of polo-like kinase 1 in adult mice has a minor impact on animal physiology, suggesting that polo-like kinase 1 inhibitors may be useful in the killing of tumour cells while sparing normal cells.

    • Monika Raab
    • , Sven Kappel
    •  & Klaus Strebhardt

  • Article |

    Soluble cytosolic proteins can be degraded in lysosomes by chaperone-mediated autophagy, however, the current method to measure this process requires isolation of lysosomes. Now, a fluorescent reporter is described that can measure this type of autophagy in intact cells.

    • Hiroshi Koga
    • , Marta Martinez-Vicente
    •  & Ana Maria Cuervo

  • Article |

    Encapsulating molecules within supramolecular frameworks for potential biological application is challenging. Bhatiaet al. incorporate a fluorescent polymer within an icosahedral DNA nanocapsule, and show that it can be used to target specific cells in vivoand map pH spatially and temporally.

    • Dhiraj Bhatia
    • , Sunaina Surana
    •  & Yamuna Krishnan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    ADAR enzymes edit double-stranded RNA, converting adenosines to inosines, and are essential for neuronal function. Eggingtonet al. quantify edit sites in RNA using a Sanger sequencing protocol and use the resulting data to develop algorithms to predict RNA edit sites.

    • Julie M. Eggington
    • , Tom Greene
    •  & Brenda L. Bass

  • Article |

    The cochlear amplifier in the inner ear is thought to mediate sensitivity to soft sounds, but this power gain has not been measured directly. Renet aluse an interferometer to measure the volume displacement and velocity of the cochlear partition and demonstrate experimentally that the cochlea amplifies soft sounds.

    • Tianying Ren
    • , Wenxuan He
    •  & Peter G. Gillespie

  • Article |

    Fluorescent proteins are widely used in molecular biology to visualize protein expression and localization. Here, Krizet al. describe an efficient and flexible modular plasmid-based eukaryotic expression cloning strategy for the homogeneous expression of several fluorescent proteins in one cell.

    • Andrijana Kriz
    • , Katharina Schmid
    •  & Philipp Berger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The influenza virus life cycle relies on sialidases, which are classified as group-1 or group-2, depending on the flexibility of the '150-loop'. In this study, chemical compounds are developed, which lock open the '150-loop', selectively inhibiting the activity of group-1 sialidases.

    • Santosh Rudrawar
    • , Jeffrey C. Dyason
    •  & Mark von Itzstein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recent developments in sequencing technologies have provided the opportunity to investigate the biodiversity of ecosystems. Such a metagenomic approach, combined with taxon clustering, is used here to demonstrate that the species richness of a marine community in Scotland is much greater than anticipated.

    • Vera G. Fonseca
    • , Gary R. Carvalho
    •  & Simon Creer

  • Article |

    The challenge of reconstructing the image of an object when viewed through an opaque material is of particular importance for biological tissues. Here, the authors show that it is possible to reconstruct the image of a complex object from interference patterns of multiple wavefronts using phase-shifting interferometry.

    • Sébastien Popoff
    • , Geoffroy Lerosey
    •  & Sylvain Gigan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There has been great interest in attempting to identify gene expression signatures that predict cancer survival. In this study a new algorithm is developed to analyse gene expression datasets that accurately classify both ER+ and ER− breast cancers into low- and high-risk groups.

    • Jie Li
    • , Anne E.G. Lenferink
    •  & Edwin Wang

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