Volume 42 Issue 12, December 2024

From mRNA drugs and the Achilles heel of obesity drugs, to single-cell biology and foundation models for drug discovery, these are some of the big stories most viewed by our readers.

Meet the biotech startups brewing milk in bioreactors to improve on baby formula.

The Innovate Genomics Institute brought together regulators from 16 countries to discuss global capacity building for the regulation of genome-edited crops. The workshop provided insights into the suitable use of technical analyses to validate edits and raised future considerations regarding regulation reporting, offering suggestions to help countries meet their objectives in the ever-growing landscape of genome editing techniques.

A basket-like device records the electrical activity of neural organoids over months of maturation.

A new mass analyzer enables protein identification at high speed and depth.

By applying the logic of conditional enzymes, we have developed a zinc-finger-dependent recombinase system, the editing activity of which is induced by zinc finger DNA binding. The system combines the precision of recombinases with the DNA target site programmability of zinc finger domains.

Many questions on the activity of the Ras proto-oncogene are unanswered due to the lack of tools for detecting active Ras in living cells. Here, we used protein design and structure prediction algorithms to develop biosensors that detect the activity and environment of endogenous Ras.

The Iniquitate pipeline assessed the impacts of cell-type imbalance on single-cell RNA sequencing integration through perturbations to dataset balance. The results indicated that cell-type imbalance not only leads to loss of biological signal in the integrated space, but also can change the interpretation of downstream analyses after integration.

Mapping higher-order RNA structures and intermolecular RNA–RNA interactions throughout the transcriptome is critical for understanding RNA functions. We developed KARR-seq, a chemical-assisted RNA proximity capture and sequencing technology that enables sensitive and accurate detection of the RNA structurome and functional RNA–RNA interactions.