In a primer, Edward Marcotte from the University of Texas walks readers through the basics of shotgun proteomics. After describing how to break up proteins into smaller pieces and how to run spectra through different databases, he says that "one area in which shotgun proteomics shows particular promise is the large-scale identification of post-translational modifications of proteins."
Two papers discuss ways to limit off-target cleavage by zinc finger nucleases, a promising technique for use in gene therapy. Both Jeffrey Miller and his colleagues at Sangamo and Michal Szczepek's group report that they engineered the FokI cleavage and dimerization domain of zinc finger nucleases to prefer heterodimer formation over homodimerization.