Biologists have long believed that cell membrane fission occurs after epsin molecules wedge themselves into the membrane’s surface, causing small pits that eventually bulge out and separate into new membrane structures. But researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have discovered a previously unknown mechanism in the fission process that they’re calling protein crowding.

The ongoing quest to delve ever deeper into a living cell has brought new insight into dynamic biological processes. But conditions inside a cell, including crowds of individual molecules, often flout the best efforts of modern imaging technology to observe activity. And that’s not to mention the fact that cells become unhealthy and die during time-lapse imaging.

Getting a clearer view inside a normal cell is a critical part of understanding what goes wrong when disease sets things awry. At Saturday’s sub-group meeting on the biology of stem cells, the Allen Institute for Cell Science debuted the first group of human induced pluripotent stem cells designed to provide exactly that level of clarity.

While the scores of sessions conducted over the course of the 2016 ASCB Annual Meeting resonated with the meeting’s theme, “Following the Arc of Scientific Discovery,” the common message woven throughout the five days was one of newfound microscopic insight. Breakthroughs in imaging are showing biologists for the first time cellular functions about which we previously could only hypothesize.

Among the myriad phenomena discussed at ASCB 2016, cell signaling and bacterial enzymes that set off eukaryote mating swarms were among the most intriguing. At the Logic of Signaling Symposium, two researchers—the Broad Institute’s Aviv Regev and Denise Montell from the University of California, Santa Barbara—discussed their work determining how cells respond to a variety of biological signals.

Although the Zika virus tends to cause few, if any, symptoms in the adults it infects, its effects on embryos and fetuses can be devastating. Outbreaks in Brazil and Central America only in the past year have been tied to increases in congenital neurodevelopmental conditions, particularly microcephaly.

If we could engineer human organs and other tissues, we could move beyond the need for donor organs and perhaps screen potential new medical therapies on manufactured tissues before going into clinical trials. Unfortunately, however, the complexity of how different types of human tissue knit themselves together poses a key challenge to programmed assembly.

Las Vegas gas station and convenience store chain Terrible Herbst has begun to migrate to PDI’s enterprise resource planning software in the wake of PDI’s acquisition of all ERP assets of its former competitor The Pinnacle Corporation. Terrible Herbst, a Pinnacle customer since 2003, becomes the first of more than 100 Pinnacle accounts to make the transition since PDI closed the transaction in January.

At its first major conference since Oracle completed its acquisition in November, NetSuite has announced a host of new features to enhance its enterprise resource planning capabilities. The changes sweep across NetSuite’s cloud-based ERP offering, including how it handles global financials, revenue recognition, billing, services resource planning, supply chain management and government compliance.

In a move toward better integration with enterprise resource planning systems, card payment processor First Data is acquiring financial tech start-up CardConnect for $750 million. CardConnect already was one of First Data’s distributors, but “we didn’t have access to their technology and they didn’t distribute all our options,” said First Data CEO Frank Bisignano.

ERP systems are intended to unify an enterprise’s data and IT across the board, but that doesn’t always work across international borders. So when aerospace behemoth Northrop Grumman prepared to expand its operations in the Middle East, Asia and the United Kingdom, it quickly became apparent that the company’s U.S.

A desire to better integrate with existing enterprise resource planning systems is driving billing organizations to invest in expanded electronic payments technology, according to a new report jointly released by the research firm Ovum and payments provider ACI Worldwide. The third annual survey of 1,475 payments decision-makers concludes that most organizations already post payments to their ERP system in real-time, yet nearly 70% of respondents plan to expand ERP integration with payments processing even more over the next 18 months to two years.

One of America’s oldest counties in Virginia has jettisoned its aging enterprise resource planning system to buy new software from Tyler Technologies Inc. of Plano, Texas. York County will spend $3 million to replace outdated technology first implemented in 1988. “While upgrades through the years have added some functionality, (the old system) remains essentially the same as when introduced,” said County Administrator Neil Morgan.

Although ERP implementation costs and time spans both have dropped in the past year, according to a new report from Panorama Consulting Solutions, neither statistic is necessarily good news. In the 2017 Report on ERP Systems and Enterprise Software, 342 CIOs reported that their ERP system’s total cost of ownership was $1.3 million – down from $3.8 million in last year’s report.

After piecing together various enterprise resource planning tools over the past few decades, managers at Retif Oil and Fuel in Louisiana knew their growing company needed an entirely new approach to ERP. But a general-purpose system wouldn’t do much good for Retif, one of America’s leading distributors of specialty petroleum products.

Decking the holiday halls via ERP offers lessons for all companies. When custom holiday ornament maker ChemArt Co. decided to deck its own halls with a new enterprise resource planning system, finding the right match wasn’t easy. The company, which has made the official White House holiday ornament for more than two decades, knew back in 2009 that its ancient Unix infrastructure would need to be replaced.