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Computable sugars: some computational resources in glycoscience

Computable sugars: some computational resources in glycoscience

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

Sequencing: Ship-Seq sails the seas

Sequencing: Ship-Seq sails the seas

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

Trace some neurons, get a big check

The idea of tracing the structure of stained neurons to obtain functional insights into in situ neural networks isn’t new and dates back over 100 years to Ramón y Cajal. Just recently I discovered that copies of his books have been digitized by Google and the illustrations are incredible. See for example Studien über die Hirnrinde des Menschen.  Read more

Calling all photomicrographers

Every year Nikon treats people to some of the most spectacular images the microscopic world has to offer when they unveal the winners of their annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. Last year Nature Methods highlighted the winning image on the cover of our November issue.  Read more