Skip to main content

Open questions in biology

BMC Biology has a scope that extends across all of biology and that is reflected in the varied expertise of our Editorial Board. Because their input is in turn crucial in the selection of both our research and our commissioned content, we invited all of our Editorial Board members to mark the tenth anniversary year of BMC Biology with short contributions representing their views on pressing or just interesting open questions in their fields, and thus to share their perspective with readers, contributors, and authors or potential authors of research submissions. Contributions will be added as new Editorial Board members join us.

  2. Recent technical advances have provided unprecedented insights into the selective deployment of the genome in developing organisms, but how such differential gene expression is used to sculpt the complex shape...

    Authors: Timothy E. Saunders and Philip W. Ingham
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:17
    Content type: Comment Published on:

  8. CRISPR-Cas systems, the purveyors of adaptive immunity in archaea and bacteria and sources of the new generation of genome engineering tools, have been studied in exquisite molecular detail. However, when it c...

    Authors: Eugene V. Koonin
    Citation: BMC Biology 2018 16:95
    Content type: Comment Published on:

  9. Seventeen years after the initial publication of the human genome, we still haven’t found all of our genes. The answer turns out to be more complex than anyone had imagined when the Human Genome Project began.

    Authors: Steven L. Salzberg
    Citation: BMC Biology 2018 16:94
    Content type: Comment Published on:

  13. A common symbiont of insects, the bacterium Wolbachia has been implicated in phenomena as diverse as sex determination, pathogen defence and speciation and is being used in public health programs to prevent mosqu...

    Authors: Francis M. Jiggins
    Citation: BMC Biology 2016 14:92
    Content type: Comment Published on: