A New Year’s resolution for bench scientists is to step out of the lab to study how life really works.
led to a treasure trove of observations: the behaviour of cuttlefish, a parasitic ichneumon wasp feasting inside live caterpillars, fossils of extinct giant sloths and ‘mastodons’. The result, of course, was his theory of natural selection.
This year, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory , of which I am director-general, is launching a programme called Molecules to Ecosystems that will pursue new ways of doing exactly this. For example, we will collaborate with ecologists, zoologists, environmental scientists and epidemiologists. And we plan to launch mobile labs with state-of-the-art molecular technologies to explore land–water interfaces across Europe — areas that harbour pollutants and pockets of antimicrobial resistance.
Technological advances will also allow researchers to explore organisms from volcanic coasts to the ocean depths. Sampling at sites that vary in pH, pollution, nutrients and salinity will offer insights into biodiversity and how natural and human-made changes influence it. Metabolic pathways are often at the heart of environmentally induced change.
Multidisciplinary collaboration enhances everyone’s research. For instance, the artificial-intelligence system AlphaFold, which predicts 3D protein structures from amino-acid sequences, was the fruit of work involving structural biologists and deep-learning specialists. It gives researchers a head start on any problem involving protein structures.
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