Empowering 21st Century Biology

Several lists of grand challenges in biology have been published recently, highlighting the strong need to answer fundamental questions about how life evolves and is governed, and how to apply this knowledge to solve the pressing problems of our times. To succeed in addressing the challenges of 21st century biology, scientists need to generate, have access to, interpret, and archive more information than ever before. But for many important questions in biology, progress is stymied by a lack of essential tools. Discovering and developing necessary tools requires new technologies, applications of existing technologies, software, model organisms, and social structures. Such new social structures will promote tool building, tool sharing, research collaboration, and interdisciplinary training. Here we identify examples of the some of the most important needs for addressing critical questions in biology and making important advances in the near future.

[1]  R. Olmstead,et al.  The Importance of Emerging Model Systems in Plant Biology , 2000, Journal of Plant Growth Regulation.

[2]  M. Ashburner,et al.  Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology , 2000, Nature Genetics.

[3]  Timothy A. Dahl,et al.  Quantitative Analysis of Liver Protein Expression During Hibernation in the Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel*S , 2004, Molecular & Cellular Proteomics.

[4]  Hans-Michael Müller,et al.  Textpresso: An Ontology-Based Information Retrieval and Extraction System for Biological Literature , 2004, PLoS biology.

[5]  Daniel J. Blankenberg,et al.  Galaxy: a platform for interactive large-scale genome analysis. , 2005, Genome research.

[6]  Oliver Bimber.  Guest Editor's Introduction: Computational Photography-The Next Big Step , 2006, Computer.

[7]  Adrian W. Briggs,et al.  Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA , 2006, Nature.

[8]  G. Whitesides.  The origins and the future of microfluidics , 2006, Nature.

[9]  Martin Wikelski,et al.  Going wild: what a global small-animal tracking system could do for experimental biologists , 2007, Journal of Experimental Biology.

[10]  R. Short,et al.  Calibration of an in situ membrane inlet mass spectrometer for measurements of dissolved gases and volatile organics in seawater. , 2007, Environmental science & technology.

[11]  Xin He,et al.  Generating gene summaries from biomedical literature: A study of semi-structured summarization , 2007, Inf. Process. Manag..

[12]  Sen Wu,et al.  Toward simpler and faster genome-wide mutagenesis in mice , 2007, Nature Genetics.

[13]  Matthew A. Wills,et al.  The choice of model organisms in evo–devo , 2007, Nature Reviews Genetics.

[14]  A. Abzhanov,et al.  Are we there yet? Tracking the development of new model systems. , 2008, Trends in genetics : TIG.

[15]  Mortazavi,et al.  Supporting Online Material Materials and Methods Figs. S1 to S13 Tables S1 to S3 References Label-free Biomedical Imaging with High Sensitivity by Stimulated Raman Scattering Microscopy , 2022 .

[16]  Ronald F. Wright,et al.  The black box , 2006 .

[17]  C. Millar,et al.  New developments in ancient genomics. , 2008, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[18]  Weida Tong,et al.  Reproducible and reliable microarray results through quality control: good laboratory proficiency and appropriate data analysis practices are essential. , 2008, Current opinion in biotechnology.

[19]  Lincoln D. Stein,et al.  Towards a cyberinfrastructure for the biological sciences: progress, visions and challenges , 2008, Nature Reviews Genetics.

[20]  B. Kuehn.  1000 Genomes Project promises closer look at variation in human genome. , 2008, JAMA.

[21]  B. Swalla,et al.  Man is but a worm: Chordate origins , 2008, Genesis.

[22]  Zoe R. Donaldson,et al.  Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and the Neurogenetics of Sociality , 2008, Science.

[23]  M. Wake,et al.  Integrative Biology: Science for the 21st Century , 2008 .

[24]  N. Makris,et al.  Critical Population Density Triggers Rapid Formation of Vast Oceanic Fish Shoals , 2009, Science.

[25]  Marc Mangel,et al.  Accelerate Synthesis in Ecology and Environmental Sciences , 2009 .

[26]  A. Janetos.  A New Biology for the 21st Century , 2009 .

[27]  R. Satterlie,et al.  The black box, the creature from the Black Lagoon, August Krogh, and the dominant animal. , 2009, Integrative and comparative biology.

[28]  Joshua M. Stuart,et al.  Genome 10K: a proposal to obtain whole-genome sequence for 10,000 vertebrate species. , 2009, The Journal of heredity.

[29]  P. Pevzner,et al.  Computing Has Changed Biology—Biology Education Must Catch Up , 2009, Science.

[30]  K. Hobson,et al.  Isoscapes to address large-scale earth science challenges , 2009 .

[31]  J. Wingfield,et al.  Comparative endocrinology in the 21st century. , 2009, Integrative and comparative biology.

[32]  R. Full,et al.  Grand challenges in organismal biology. , 2009, Integrative and comparative biology.

[33]  R. Mott,et al.  The 1001 Genomes Project for Arabidopsis thaliana , 2009, Genome Biology.

[34]  J. Wingfield,et al.  Comparative endocrinology in the 21 st century , 2009 .

[35]  B. Palsson,et al.  Towards genome-scale signalling-network reconstructions , 2010, Nature Reviews Genetics.

[36]  David Houle,et al.  Numbering the hairs on our heads: The shared challenge and promise of phenomics , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[37]  L. Tomanek.  Environmental proteomics: changes in the proteome of marine organisms in response to environmental stress, pollutants, infection, symbiosis, and development. , 2011, Annual review of marine science.