Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Which will be the hottest topic in molecular biology in a few years? The results



Some time ago, I posted a poll here at MolBio Research Highlights asking people to vote for the topic they thought was going to be hottest in molecular biology in a few years [See The hottest molbio topics: the next few years]. Some of the areas listed in that poll are hot even right now, but may continue to rise in the next couple of years.

The poll is now over and I wanted to share the results with you in an attractive way, so I decided to accompany these results with blog posts discussing them. These posts will be written by experts in the respective areas of research. In order to do this, I asked a few scientists, which are also notorious bloggers, to answer a simple question: “why do you think people voted for that specific field?”. Further, I encouraged them to extend their posts to include and discuss anything else they wanted, within that respective field.

So without further ado, here are the poll results:




Stay tuned for the posts discussing these results which will be appearing here soon. David García from You'd Prefer An Argonaute will be talking about “Regulatory RNAs” while Keith Robison from Omics! Omics! will be discussing “New DNA sequencing technologies and postgenomics”.


Do you want to talk about the other fields listed and get your post featured here in MolBio Research Highlights? Feel free to send me an email!



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2 Comments:

el astudillo said...

It is funny the low numbers of votes that the option about stem cell research gained in your poll. This may reflect either a bias in your readers (more molecular biologists than cell biologists) or a loss of faith about the real capabilities of stem cell research to solve some of the many challenges that the scientific community expected. Promises of diseases cured by stem cell therapies, for example, or the increase of the development of new drugs and treatments. In the end, we are not quite close to understand some biological problems and processes, and new technologies are still awaiting to be useful to make a visible impact in research areas more sensitive to the common people. Technologies such as new sequencing technologies are still far from being appreciated for the people walking by the street.

Alejandro Montenegro-Montero said...

Thanks for your comment!

The question was indeed aimed at molecular biologists, for them to answer from a research point of view, rather than from an "impact on society" one.

Let's wait for Pancho's post on the matter, which will be added to David's and Keith's posts discussing the results.