Cell biology is expanding, fusing with physics, coalescing with computational modeling, and bonding with bioinformatics. Yesterday Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC) rolled out a special quantitative biology issue, its first-ever “extra” edition, to encompass the broad new horizons of cell biology. The new issue features so many big names from cell biology and biophysics that, if “Quantitative Biology” were a Hollywood blockbuster, the science paparazzi would be stalking MBoC editor David Drubin.
The “quant bio” issue features:
W.E. Moerner , Stanford professor and winner just last month of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to developing superresolution imaging. With colleagues, Moerner describes how they tracked the three dimensional motion of chromosomal loci in live cells using a superresolution imaging technique.
Tom Pollard , Yale professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences, along with Yale colleague Julien Berro, have doubled down with two papers in the special issue. Together they present their new super resolution imaging technique for analyzing endocytic dynamics in live cells, which they use to analyze a capping protein during endocytosis.
Tomas Kirchhausen , professor at Harvard, and colleagues use genome edited cells expressing a tagged dynamin, a protein involved in the scission of vesicles, to measure the recruitment of single dynamin molecules in live cells.
Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz , NIH Distinguished Investigator and ASCB president, serves as the guest editor for the issue. “This special issue of MBoC recognizes this transformation in cell biology’s methodologies and conceptual foundations, and signals a broadening of the scope of MBoC to include papers that employ quantitative approaches to address cell biology problems,” writes Lippincott-Schwartz in an editorial.
About the Author:
Christina Szalinski is a science writer with a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Pittsburgh.
