Archive by category | Editorials

Anniversary Issue Cover

Anniversary Issue Cover

Over the summer we asked for contributions from our readers for the cover of our tenth anniversary issue. We asked for images of the number “10” made using biological research tools and techniques. We were delighted to have many excellent submissions and to be able to use them all on the cover. Here is a bit more detail about these images.  Read more

Light sheet imaging in Nature Methods

It was only a few months before Nature Methods was launched in October 2004 that Jan Huisken and Ernst Stelzer had published a paper in Science in which they used light sheet microscopy – what they called selective plane illumination microscopy or SPIM – to image fluorescence within transgenic embryos. Simplistically put, this century-old technique achieves optical sectioning by illuminating a sample through its width with a thin sheet of light. In the last decade, Nature Methods has published a steady stream of papers reporting developments in light-sheet imaging. Here are the highlights.  Read more

Know your methods

In the September 2014 issue of Nature Methods, authors at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology argue in a Commentary that a productive way to frame the discussion about the reproducibility of biological results is to focus on how best to make good measurements. In other words, increasing the confidence in measurements is likely to also increase the reproducibility of the results of those measurements. Notably, in complex biological systems, making good measurements is not trivial. Read this month’s editorial introducing this topic here and link to the Commentary here.  Read more