Inactivating TAOK1 prompts tentacle-like protrusions to form all over a neuron’s surface, revealing the gene’s role in molding the membrane.

The single-celled fungus allows researchers to study Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS and other brain diseases with unparalleled speed and scale.

For a team at the University of California, San Diego, nine years of tinkering with arsenic paid off in the development of a new technique that can tag proteins with different colors over time and even zero in to electron microscopic resolution. Roger Tsien, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of pharmacology, chemistry, and biochemistry at UCSD, says the project started with the suggestion from a colleague that one can tag a two-cysteine sequence in a protein with a singl

Meet the researchers building a thermogenetic toolbox.

Meet some of the people featured in the May 2017 issue of The Scientist.

Neuroscientists are automating neural imaging and recording, allowing them to monitor increasingly large swaths of the brain in living, behaving animals.
 

For this article, Steve Bunk interviewed David J. Julius, assistant professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco. Data from the Web of Science (ISI, Philadelphia) show that this paper has been cited significantly more often than the average paper of the same type and age. M.J. Caterina, M.A. Schumacher, M. Tominaga, T.A. Rosen, J.D. Levin, D. Julius, "The capsaicin receptor: a heat-activated ion channel in the pain pathway," Nature, 389:816-24, Oct. 2

The FDA has given the green light to the first major new classes of antidepressant therapies in decades, opening up new avenues for therapeutic development.

Courtesy of SR Eng  BABY STAINS: The head of a transgenic murine embryo in which a marker enzyme has been specifically expressed in the sensory neurons of the trigeminal and dorsal root ganglia. The marker allows staining of the projections of these neurons into, among other areas, the hindbrain and spinal cord. (S.R. Eng et al., "Defects in sensory axon growth precede neuronal death in Brn3a-deficient mice," J Neurosci, 21:541-9, 2001.) Somewhere in the 200 million bases of the human ge

ul li { font-family:"Trebuchet MS",arial,helvetica; font-size:10.5pt; line-height:14pt; } By Amber Dance Guiding light How to manipulate cellular events with the right light sensing molecule and a flash of light. Using light-producing molecules to observe cellular events is standard fare in many a lab, but it’s only recently that scientists have begun to harness the power of light to manipulate biological systems experimen