As the pace of discovery in cellular and molecular biology continues to accelerate, it is more important than ever to engage with the unresolved questions that challenge and inspire the scientific community.
To encourage dialogue and exploration of these critical issues, Open Biology announced its inaugural Open Questions Competition in July, as an opportunity for researchers to highlight and share their perspectives on the most pressing, yet often understudied, questions in the field.
The competition invites submissions for our Open Questions article type, a short-format piece that presents a current, significant question in biology, ripe for further investigation. With a chance to win a cash prize of £1,000 and a full Article Processing Charge (APC) waiver, this is an opportunity to make your voice heard while contributing to the ongoing conversation around cutting-edge research.
In this blog post, we speak with Martha Cyert, handling editor at Open Biology, who shares her insights into the importance of Open Questions and the inspiration behind launching this competition. Additionally, we interview Associate Editor Tin Tin Su, the author of the journal's first Open Questions article, to explore her experience and the thought process that went into crafting her submission.
Martha Cyert, Stanford University: "I encourage you all to submit articles for Open Questions. You know what the burning questions are, where the frontier of knowledge is in that area, and this is a chance, really to tell others more broadly what is so exciting and so ripe for discovery right now in your area. By making your articles accessible to a broad audience- including students, recent PhDs, and funders like philanthropists and the NIH - as an educational initiative, you can inspire others to engage with your field. We look forward to seeing everyone's submissions!"
Q&A with Associate Editor Tin Tin Su, University of Colorado Boulder
Please tell us about your article and how it came about?
I had heard about this new article type, and I found it very exciting. The main reason is that, at the end of our research articles, we usually dedicate just a few lines—or at most, a paragraph—about what could be done next or the unanswered questions that remain after completing a study. But those brief mentions often stimulate the next steps in research. For instance, we had recently made an interesting observation: during regeneration in Drosophila, some cells basically take on new fates. We also discovered that known cell-death proteins play a non-death role. This raised intriguing questions about how these proteins function—when they kill and when they don't—that had been swirling around in my mind.
When the Open Questions article type was introduced, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to explore these ideas further. Instead of squeezing everything into a few lines or one paragraph at the end of a research paper, why not create a whole article dedicated to these questions and share it more broadly? And that's how it all came about.
Why do you think Open Questions are important in scientific literature?
I think Open Questions articles are important for the reasons I mentioned earlier. At the end of a study or a published report, you naturally start to think about what's next—what are the unanswered questions? If you conduct experiments properly, they not only provide answers but also raise new questions. These are the open questions, and having a dedicated article to recognise and explore them in depth allows researchers to articulate why they’re important and share them in a published format. This can help stimulate interest in a particular subfield and encourage more people to think about and work on those questions.
In fact, the topic of non-death roles for cell-death proteins is a great example. After we published our Open Questions article, someone reached out to tell me that a group of researchers was also interested in this topic and planning the first-ever conference on it. I contacted them and asked to attend, and since then, this has grown into a thriving field. The first meeting was in Israel, followed by one in Ireland, and most recently, in Canada—we’ve now had three conferences on this topic.
This experience illustrates why Open Questions articles matter: they bring together people who have been thinking about similar problems.
Any there any examples of published Open Question articles that you’ve enjoyed or areas you might like to see represented in the collection?
To answer the first question: as a graduate student, I worked on transcriptional regulation, and I’ve always had an affinity for that field, even though I no longer work directly in it. That’s why I particularly enjoyed the Open Questions article on RNA Polymerase II pausing in development and its role in orchestrating transcription, authored by Abdul Hashan and colleagues. Reading it allowed me to catch up with the field.
I think that in general, whether we’re studying transcription or translation, there’s a lot of focus on initiation—how it starts. But how you keep it going, how elongation happens, is equally important, though perhaps less appreciated and less well studied. This article shines a spotlight on pausing and the processes that occur after initiation, particularly in the context of development, which makes it both timely and relevant. I found it really insightful and enjoyable.
As for the second question, about future topics that might be interesting, I can only share some thoughts I’ve been having. One area I’ve been pondering is the impact of the environment on genetics and biology. As a laboratory scientist, we control everything—temperature, oxygen levels, and other environmental factors are kept constant. But it makes me wonder: how relevant are our findings to the real world, where the environment is rapidly changing? Temperatures are rising, pollutants are increasing, and so on. If an observation is made in a controlled lab environment, will it hold true when the temperature increases by two degrees or when external factors come into play? I think the intersection of environment and molecular biology is going to be a fascinating area for future research.
Open Biology’s Open Questions competition closes on 30 November 2024. Can’t make the deadline? You can still submit your article for a chance to be featured in our special collection.
Image: Colloid. Credit: KarlGaff, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
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