Nature Methods
Academic journal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nature Methods is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering new scientific techniques. It was established in 2004 and is published by Springer Nature under the Nature Portfolio. Like other Nature journals, there is no external editorial board and editorial decisions are made by an in-house team, although peer review by external experts forms a part of the review process.[1] The editor-in-chief is Allison Doerr.[2]
Method of the Year
Each January, Nature Methods designates a "Method of the Year" — a field, approach or technique that the editors judge to have enabled major recent advances in the life sciences. The selection is accompanied by a special issue containing an editorial, primer-style commentaries and a "News Feature" by the journal's technology editor.[3] The award has been given annually since 2007 and frequently highlights experimental and computational techniques that transform how biological data are generated or analysed.
Selections by year
| Year | Method | Brief description | Editorial reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | Next-generation DNA sequencing | Massively parallel short-read platforms (e.g. Illumina, 454, SOLiD) that increased sequencing throughput by several orders of magnitude. | [4] |
| 2008 | Super-resolution microscopy | Fluorescence imaging techniques such as STED, PALM and STORM that surpass the optical diffraction limit. | [5] |
| 2009 | Induced pluripotent stem cells | Reprogramming of somatic cells into a pluripotent state, enabling patient-specific disease models and regenerative medicine research. | [6] |
| 2010 | Optogenetics | Genetically encoded opsins that allow neural activity to be controlled with light at millisecond timescales. | [7] |
| 2011 | Gene-editing nucleases | Programmable zinc-finger nucleases, TALENs and engineered meganucleases used for targeted genome editing. | [8] |
| 2012 | Targeted proteomics | Mass-spectrometry workflows such as selected reaction monitoring (SRM/MRM) that quantify pre-defined sets of proteins with high reproducibility. | [9] |
| 2013 | Single-cell sequencing | Genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomic profiling at the resolution of individual cells. | [10] |
| 2014 | Light sheet fluorescence microscopy | Plane-illumination microscopy that enables high-speed, low-phototoxicity 3D imaging of living embryos and tissues. | [11] |
| 2015 | Cryo-electron microscopy | Single-particle cryo-EM, enabled by direct electron detectors and improved software, achieving near-atomic resolution structures of biomolecules in solution. | [12] |
| 2016 | Epitranscriptome analysis | Sequencing-based profiling of chemical modifications on RNA, such as m6A, pseudouridine and inosine. | [13] |
| 2017 | Organoids | Three-dimensional self-organising tissue cultures derived from stem cells. | [14] |
| 2018 | Imaging in freely behaving animals | Miniaturised head-mounted microscopes and animal-tracking imaging systems for recording neuronal activity during natural behaviours in unrestrained model organisms. | [15] |
| 2019 | Single-cell multimodal omics | Joint measurement of multiple molecular layers (e.g. genome+transcriptome, transcriptome+chromatin) within the same single cell. | [16] |
| 2020 | Spatially resolved transcriptomics | Sequencing- and imaging-based methods that locate gene-expression measurements within intact tissue sections. | [17] |
| 2021 | Protein structure prediction | Deep-learning systems such as AlphaFold 2 and RoseTTAFold that predict protein 3D structure from sequence at near-experimental accuracy. | [18] |
| 2022 | Long-read sequencing | Single-molecule platforms from PacBio and Oxford Nanopore producing reads of tens of kilobases, enabling high-quality genome assemblies and detection of structural variants and DNA modifications. | [19] |
| 2023 | Stem-cell-based embryo models | Self-organising 3D cultures derived from pluripotent stem cells that recapitulate aspects of mammalian embryogenesis. | [20] |
| 2024 | Spatial proteomics | Imaging and mass-spectrometry approaches that map proteins and post-translational modifications across intact tissues at sub-cellular resolution. | [21] |
| 2025 | Electron-microscopy-based connectomics | Volume electron microscopy combined with AI-assisted reconstruction to map synaptic-resolution wiring diagrams of nervous systems, including whole-brain connectomes of model organisms such as Drosophila. | [22] |
According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal had a 2021 impact factor of 47.990, ranking it first in the category "Biochemical Research Methods".[23]
