Methods papers for MD997

I am now running a new module for masters students, MD997. The aim is to introduce the class to a range of advanced research methods and to get them to think about how to formulate their own research question(s).

The module is built around a paper which is allocated in the first session. I had to come up with a list of methods-type papers, which I am posting below. There are 16 students and I picked 23 papers. I aimed to cover their interests, which are biological but with some chemistry, physics and programming thrown in. The papers are a bit imaging-biased but I tried to get some ‘omics and neuro in there. There were some preprints on the list to make sure I covered the latest stuff.

The students picked their top 3 papers and we managed to assign them without too much trouble. Every paper got at least one vote. Some papers were in high demand. Fitzpatrick et al. on cryoEM of Alzheimer’s samples and the organoid paper from Lancaster et al. had by far the most votes.

The students present this paper to the class and also use it to formulate their own research proposal. Which one would you pick?

1. Booth, D.G. et al. (2016) 3D-CLEM Reveals that a Major Portion of Mitotic Chromosomes Is Not Chromatin Mol Cell 64, 790-802. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2016.10.009
2. Chai, H. et al. (2017) Neural Circuit-Specialized Astrocytes: Transcriptomic, Proteomic, Morphological, and Functional Evidence Neuron 95, 531-549 e9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.06.029
3. Chang, J.B. et al. (2017) Iterative expansion microscopy Nat Methods 14, 593-599. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4261
4. Chen, B.C. et al. (2014) Lattice light-sheet microscopy: imaging molecules to embryos at high spatiotemporal resolution Science 346, 1257998. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1257998
5. Chung, K. & Deisseroth, K. (2013) CLARITY for mapping the nervous system Nat Methods 10, 508-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2481
6. Eichler, K. et al. (2017) The Complete Connectome Of A Learning And Memory Center In An Insect Brain bioRxiv. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/141762
7. Fitzpatrick, A.W.P. et al. (2017) Cryo-EM structures of tau filaments from Alzheimer’s disease Nature 547, 185-190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature23002
8. Habib, N. et al. (2017) Massively parallel single-nucleus RNA-seq with DroNc-seq Nat Methods 14, 955-958. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4407
9. Hardman, G. et al. (2017) Extensive non-canonical phosphorylation in human cells revealed using strong-anion exchange-mediated phosphoproteomics bioRxiv. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/202820
10. Herzik, M.A., Jr. et al. (2017) Achieving better-than-3-A resolution by single-particle cryo-EM at 200 keV Nat Methods. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4461
11. Jacquemet, G. et al. (2017) FiloQuant reveals increased filopodia density during breast cancer progression J Cell Biol 216, 3387-3403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201704045
12. Jungmann, R. et al. (2014) Multiplexed 3D cellular super-resolution imaging with DNA-PAINT and Exchange-PAINT Nat Methods 11, 313-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2835
13. Kim, D.I. et al. (2016) An improved smaller biotin ligase for BioID proximity labeling Mol Biol Cell 27, 1188-96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E15-12-0844
14. Lancaster, M.A. et al. (2013) Cerebral organoids model human brain development and microcephaly Nature 501, 373-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12517
15. Madisen, L. et al. (2012) A toolbox of Cre-dependent optogenetic transgenic mice for light-induced activation and silencing Nat Neurosci 15, 793-802. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.3078
16. Penn, A.C. et al. (2017) Hippocampal LTP and contextual learning require surface diffusion of AMPA receptors Nature 549, 384-388. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature23658
17. Qin, P. et al. (2017) Live cell imaging of low- and non-repetitive chromosome loci using CRISPR-Cas9 Nat Commun 8, 14725. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14725
18. Quick, J. et al. (2016) Real-time, portable genome sequencing for Ebola surveillance Nature 530, 228-232. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature16996
19. Ries, J. et al. (2012) A simple, versatile method for GFP-based super-resolution microscopy via nanobodies Nat Methods 9, 582-4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1991
20. Rogerson, D.T. et al. (2015) Efficient genetic encoding of phosphoserine and its nonhydrolyzable analog Nat Chem Biol 11, 496-503. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.1823
21. Russell, M.R. et al. (2017) 3D correlative light and electron microscopy of cultured cells using serial blockface scanning electron microscopy J Cell Sci 130, 278-291. http://dx.doi.org/10.1242/jcs.188433
22. Strickland, D. et al. (2012) TULIPs: tunable, light-controlled interacting protein tags for cell biology Nat Methods 9, 379-84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1904
23. Yang, J. et al. (2015) The I-TASSER Suite: protein structure and function prediction Nat Methods 12, 7-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3213

If you are going to do a similar exercise, Twitter is invaluable for suggestions for papers. None of the students complained that they couldn’t find three papers which matched their interests. I set up a slide carousel in Powerpoint with the front page of each paper together with some key words to tell the class quickly what the paper was about. I gave them some discussion time and then collated their choices on the board. Assigning the papers was quite straightforward, trying to honour the first choices as far as possible. Having an excess of papers prevented too much horse trading for the papers that multiple people had picked.

Hopefully you find this list useful. I was inspired by Raphaël posting his own list here.