Browse Articles | Nature Methods

The reluctant blank slate: reprogramming elephant cells

Asian elephant cells can be reprogrammed to pluripotency, but only by navigating unusually stringent tumor-suppressive surveillance associated with expanded TP53 and LIF retrogene architecture. The work establishes a practical platform for conservation and disease modeling and sharpens a broader question: where exactly does tumor suppression end and the barrier to cellular renewal begin?

• Thomas P. Zwaka
• Marion Déjosez

Deep molecular profiling in three dimensions

A new platform integrates volumetric light-sheet imaging with precision computer-guided milling to enable high-depth molecular analysis of spatially defined regions within intact tissues.

• Yue Li
• Per Uhlén

Reclone: a global research community building equitable access to reagents

The Reagent Collaboration Network (Reclone) seeks to address the global asymmetry in research and development in biotechnology across the Global South through open sharing of biomaterials, protocols and knowledge. The end goal is to build an international community enabling more sustainable, equitable and decentralized reagent manufacturing. The initiative works through regional distribution hubs and nodes to provide local access to resources and expertise in reagent manufacturing.

• Jennifer C. Molloy
• Fernán Federici
• Elena Rosca

3D pathology-guided microdissection

This method combines open-top light-sheet microscopy with computer numerical controlled milling for high-precision 3D microdissection of tissues.

• Huai-Ching Hsieh
• Gan Gao
• Jonathan T. C. Liu

SmartTrap: automated precision experiments with optical tweezers

SmartTrap is a smart optical tweezers platform that integrates real-time three-dimensional particle tracking, electronics and microfluidics to perform single-molecule biophysics and cell mechanics experiments with minimal human intervention.

• Martin Selin
• Antonio Ciarlo
• Giovanni Volpe

A foundation model to help understand the regulatory implications of 3D genome organization

We developed a foundation model for 3D genome organization from Hi-C-derived chromatin structure. HiCFoundation supports integrative analysis linking genome architecture to downstream regulatory function. Through large-scale self-supervised pretraining on Hi-C data, followed by fine-tuning on downstream tasks, it provides a unified, efficient, generalizable and interpretable paradigm for 3D genome, single-cell and multiomics analysis across species.