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The MouseLight Project team at Janelia unveils a microscope and method for long-range tracing of neurons in the mouse brain.

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Researchers learn more details about how CRISPR works in cells.

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HHMI scientists have identified a set of proteins that plays a surprisingly broad role in guiding tissue formation in plant roots.

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WildCam Gorongosa is a new citizen science project that needs your help. You can contribute to the restoration of one of the most biodiverse places in Africa from your phone or computer. Sign up at wildcamgorongosa.org to identify animals in photos taken by motion-activated trail cameras.

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Scientists can now watch dynamic biological processes with unprecedented clarity in living cells using new imaging techniques developed by researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus. The new methods dramatically improve on the spatial resolution provided by structured illumination microscopy, one of the best imaging methods for seeing inside living cells. Janelia group leader Eric Betzig and postdoctoral fellow Dong Li led the research. Betzig was one of three scientists awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have identified stem cells in the liver that give rise to functional liver cells. The work solves a long-standing mystery about the origin of new cells in the liver, which must constantly be replenished as cells die off, even in a healthy organ.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has selected 45 predoctoral students from 18 countries to receive fellowships that will help them complete their graduate degrees in the life sciences . The awardees will receive $43,000 during each year of the fellowship. Three of the new fellows are from countries that were not represented in previous years of the program – Jamaica, Philippines, and Poland.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s newly expanded Gilliam Fellowships for Advanced Study Program has awarded 30 fellowships to outstanding graduate students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. The awards provide full support to promising students pursuing doctoral degrees in the life sciences who are committed to increasing diversity among scientists. Each fellow will receive an annual award totaling $43,000, which includes a stipend, a training allowance, and an institutional allowance, for up to three years. Previously, HHMI selected between five and nine Gilliam fellows per year.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have profiled key features of the genetic material inside three types of brain cells and found vast differences in the patterns of chemical modifications that affect how the genes in each type of neuron are regulated. The analysis was made possible by a new method of collecting and purifying the nuclei of specific kinds of cells. Doing this type of study on cells in brain tissue has been challenging because the cells are densely packed and intimately intertwined.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is announcing a five-year, $2.3 million grant to support educational activities and infrastructure development at the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique.

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The new study, co-led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator David Reich at Harvard Medical School and Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, provides the first genetic evidence that humans interbred with Neanderthals in Europe.

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New technology developed by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers makes it possible to test for current and past infections with any known human virus by analyzing a single drop of a person's blood. The method, called VirScan, is an efficient alternative to existing diagnostics that test for specific viruses one at a time.

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HHMI has selected 26 researchers from 19 institutions to become HHMI investigators. These researchers were selected for their individual scientific excellence from a group of 894 eligible applicants. The initiative represents an investment in basic biomedical research of $153 million over the next five years.

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If you walk into a dark room, you can still find your way to the light switch. That’s because your brain keeps track of landmarks and the direction in which you are moving. Fruit flies also boast an internal compass that works when the lights go out, scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus have discovered. Their findings suggest that dissecting how fruit flies navigate through the world could help researchers understand how humans and other mammals perform similar tasks.

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Studying fruit fly larvae, Janelia scientists have mapped the entire neural circuit involved in combining vibration and pain sensations used in triggering an escape behavior.

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Over the last seven years, thousands of undergraduate students have sequenced and analyzed the genomes of bacteria-infecting viruses, known as bacteriophages. Those genomes are now the focal point of a new study that examined the genetic diversity of 627 phages isolated from a single species of bacteria. The study shows a continuum of genetic diversity rather than discrete groups within the population of bacteriophages studied.

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Janelia Research Campus scientists have found that a set of neurons is responsible for the unpleasant feelings associated with hunger. The neurons do not drive an animal to eat, but rather teach an animal to respond to sensory cues that signal the presence of food.

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Sixty-eight medical and veterinary students from 37 different schools across the country will participate in HHMI's year-long Medical Research Fellows Program. The students will conduct a full year of mentored biomedical research training as part of the annual $2.8 million program.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have simplified the chemical synthesis of small molecules, eliminating a major bottleneck that limits the exploration of a class of compounds offering tremendous potential for medicine and technology.

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Scientist at Janelia Research Campus wins The Brain Prize for developing a tool that advances our understanding of how the brain's networks process information.

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The new vaccine was found to be effective against the two most common forms of herpes that cause cold sores (HSV-1) and genital ulcers (HSV-2). Both are known to infect the body’s nerve cells, where the virus can lay dormant for years before symptoms reappear. The new vaccine is the first to prevent this type of latent infection.

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Scientists at Janelia Research Campus have identified a neural circuit that connects motor planning to movement.

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A new tool developed at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus lets scientists shine a light on an animal's brain to permanently mark neurons that are active at a particular time. The tool -- a fluorescent protein called CaMPARI that was developed at Janelia -- converts from green to red when calcium floods a nerve cell after the cell fires. The permanent mark frees scientists from the need to focus a microscope on the right cells at the right time to observe neuronal activity.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have identified a circuit in the brains of mice that regulates thirst. When a subset of cells in the circuit is switched on, mice immediately begin drinking water, even if they are fully hydrated. A second set of cells suppresses the urge to drink.

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A team of researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus has won first prize in the 2014 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition for their video that captures the early development of a fruit fly embryo.

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Researchers at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus have used motion-capture technology to reveal new insight into the sophisticated information processing and acrobatic skills of dragonflies on the hunt.

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A new imaging platform developed by Eric Betzig and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus offers another leap forward for light microscopy. The new technology collects high-resolution images rapidly and minimizes damage to cells, meaning it can image the three-dimensional activity of molecules, cells, and embryos in fine detail over longer periods than was previously possible. Betzig was one of three scientists who shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry earlier this month.

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Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have shown that the brain can temporarily disconnect information about past experience from decision-making circuits, thereby triggering random behavior.

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New studies of ancient DNA are shifting scientists' ideas of how groups of people migrated across the globe and interacted with one another thousands of years ago. By comparing nine ancient genomes to those of modern humans, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have shown that previously unrecognized groups contributed to the genetic mix now present in most modern-day Europeans.

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By manipulating neural circuits in the brain of mice, scientists have altered the emotional associations of specific memories. The research, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Susumu Tonegawa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reveals that the connections between the part of the brain that stores contextual information about an experience and the part of the brain that stores the emotional memory of that experience are malleable.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute awards nearly $5 million in research fellowships to 46 predoctoral students from 24 countries.

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New technologies for monitoring brain activity are generating unprecedented quantities of information. That data may hold new insights into how the brain works – but only if researchers can interpret it. To help make sense of the data, neuroscientists can now harness the power of distributed computing with Thunder, a library of tools developed at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus. Thunder speeds the analysis of data sets that are so large and complex they would take days or weeks to analyze on a single workstation – if a single workstation could do it at all. Janelia group leaders Jeremy Freeman, Misha Ahrens, and other colleagues at Janelia and the University of California, Berkeley, report in the July 27, 2014, issue of the journal Nature Methods that they have used Thunder to quickly find patterns in high-resolution images collected from the brains of active zebrafish and mice with multiple imaging techniques.

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Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus have developed a new computational method that can rapidly track the three-dimensional movements of cells in such data-rich images. Using the method, the Janelia scientists can essentially automate much of the time-consuming process of reconstructing an animal's developmental building plan cell by cell.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced today that 15 leading scientist-educators have been named HHMI professors. Each will receive $1 million over five years to create activities that integrate their research with student learning in ways that enhance undergraduate students’ understanding of science.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF) announced the establishment of an Advanced Imaging Center at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus that will make leading-edge imaging technologies more widely available to the scientific community before the instruments are available commercially.

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Every millisecond counts when a fruit fly is being hunted by a damselfly. Janelia scientists find that fruit flies can deploy two escape behaviors, depending on circumstances.

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A single-letter change in the genetic code is enough to generate blond hair in humans, in dramatic contrast to our dark-haired ancestors. A new analysis by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists has pinpointed that change, which is common in the genomes of Northern Europeans, and shown how it fine-tunes the regulation of an essential gene.

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Can the nationally acclaimed Meyerhoff Scholars Program, which has an unparalleled record of advancing diversity in the sciences, be adapted successfully at more universities? That question is at the heart of a new partnership, the Meyerhoff Adaptation Project, between the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Pennsylvania State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have used an analysis of channelrhodopsin’s molecular structure to guide a series of genetic mutations to the ion channel that grant the power to silence neurons with an unprecedented level of control.

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Seventy of the nation’s top medical and veterinary students have been selected to participate in the 26th class of the HHMI Medical Research Fellows Program, a $2.8 million annual initiative to increase the training of future physician-scientists. The students will put their medical studies on-hold for one year to conduct intensive, mentored biomedical research at 32 fellowship institutions across the country.

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The complexity of biology can befuddle even the most sophisticated light microscopes. Biological samples bend light in unpredictable ways, returning difficult-to-interpret information to the microscope and distorting the resulting image. New imaging technology developed at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus rapidly corrects for these distortions and sharpens high-resolution images over large volumes of tissue. The approach, a form of adaptive optics, works in tissues that do not scatter light, making it well suited to imaging the transparent bodies of zebrafish and the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, important model organisms in biological research. Janelia group leader Eric Betzig says his team developed the new technology by combining adaptive optics strategies that astronomers and ophthalmologists use to cancel out similar distortions in their images.

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New research shows that humans are capable of discriminating at least one trillion different odors. HHMI scientists determined that our sense of smell is prepared to recognize this vast olfactory palette after testing individuals' ability to recognize differences between complex odors mixed in the laboratory. It has been said for decades that humans were limited to distinguishing only 10,000 different odors.

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In the tropical highlands of South America and East Africa, cool temperatures have historically kept mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, at bay. New research by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists shows that as annual temperatures rise in these areas, malaria can spread to populations in higher elevations that had historically not been at as much risk of being infected by malaria parasites.

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According to a newly published analysis, students in HHMI's Science Education Alliance-PHAGES program have published their own scientific results, receive higher grades in their biology courses, are more likely to continue their education than overall student populations, and report an engagement in the process of science similar to what is reported by students who participate in “traditional” apprentice-based summer research.

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New research from HHMI scientists reveals how a foreign-DNA-destroying system, known as CRISPR, efficiently locates its DNA targets within a bacterial genome.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers at Harvard Medical School have analyzed exactly which areas of the human genome retain segments of Neanderthal DNA, passed down throughout the generations. By studying which genes modern humans still retain from our Neanderthal ancestors, researchers are able to tell a clearer story about the biological impact of human-Neanderthal interbreeding.

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HHMI seeks to appoint up to 25 new biomedical researchers through a national open competition.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have identified and exploited a newfound “Achilles heel” in K-Ras, the most commonly mutated oncogene in human cancers. K-Ras has earned a reputation as being “undruggable” because scientific researchers have failed to design a drug that successfully targets the mutant gene. The weak point is a newly discovered “pocket,” or binding site, identified by HHMI investigator Kevan M. Shokat and colleagues. Shokat and his team have designed a chemical compound that fits inside this pocket and inhibits the normal activity of mutant K-Ras, but leaves the normal protein untouched.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have developed a new method that generates a high-resolution protein structure from crystals one-million times smaller than those needed for X-ray crystallography, the most common method for determining protein structure. The new technique, called MicroED, has the potential to accelerate structural biologists' efforts and to expand the repertoire of proteins whose high-resolution structures can be solved.

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New evidence suggests that aneuploidy patterns of chromosome deletion or amplification that are recurrent among tumors actually represent a driving force during tumor evolution and are very frequent in cancer.