In ‘Meet some code-breakers of noncoding RNAs,’ the technology feature in the February issue of Nature Methods, we speak with a few scientists about the path ahead in methods for characterize the noncoding RNAs. Read more
Nature research journal editors speak with Eric Nestler and Robert Greene about neurobiology and the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) 2017 annual meeting. Read more
From June 14-17, scientists convened in Boston for the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). Here is the browsable program. Read more
As glycoscience advances, labs will increasingly want to ask questions about glycosylation sites on a protein or the structure of a sugar, says Raja Mazumder, a bioinformatician at George Washington University. They might ask for example: are there glycosyltransferases that are expressed in liver but not in the heart, or, which ones are overexpressed by a factor of three in more than two cancers. Such questions require infrastructure building, he says, because right now there is no mechanism to allow such queries. But he and others are building such capabilities. Mazumder along with William York at the University of Georgia are starting to build a glycoscience informatics portal. Read more
Tuning reagents, software, or equipment is all in a day’s work in the lab. Building instruments from scratch, however, is a task more typical for physicists who might 3D print or machine the parts they need and then assemble them into the instrument they want. They might construct an instrument for a specific experiment or develop a design that helps hundreds of labs. That model could go on to be modified and hacked in a variety of ways. Read more
To study a primordial nervous system, Leonid Moroz brings the tools of biology to the open sea. Nature Methods spoke with the neurobiologist turned sea adventurer. Meet neurobiologist Leonid Moroz of the University of Florida, the inventor of Ship-Seq. His hair is not always this wild, although his ideas tend to be. Read more
The scientist profiled in the February issue of Nature Methods (the Author File) is Janet Thornton, the director of the European Bioinformatics Institute. Read more