Hello, fellow readers and bloggers. I’m back from a blogging break and just wanted to share some exciting chemistry-related papers from the March issue of Nature Methods.

From Ruedi Aebersold and colleagues, we have a paper that compares the three most popular enrichment strategies for analyzing the phosphoproteome by mass spectrometry. Using an unbiased approach, they discovered that none of these strategies alone was sufficient for comprehensive analysis of all phosphorylated proteins in the proteome of cells from a fruit fly. Also in the mass spectrometry arena, we have a Perspective from Steven Gygi and Joshua Elias that provides a guide to researchers using the target-decoy database search strategy to increase confidence in peptide identification.

Peter Schultz and company now present a method to genetically incorporate unnatural amino acids into proteins in mammalian cells, which could open up a whole new range of exciting biological experiments in mammalian systems. And finally, we even have some nanotechnology! Michelle Wang and colleagues describe a method to reproducibly fabricate quartz nano-cylinders, and use them to measure DNA twisting in an angular optical trap.

Thanks for reading!

Allison Doerr (Associate Editor, Nature Methods)

Engineers make the most anti-reflective coating yet.

Shiny metal objects have been reduced to a dull, record-breaking black by a super anti-reflective coating. As Nigel Tufnel from This is Spinal Tap says in the film: “It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.”

Read the story here.