Topics in biology that are not researched as much as they should be. Initial offering is made by the participants of Russian-speaking Biology-related telegram chat Лапкочат GANG.
Disclaimer: the descriptions are not meant to be comprehensive, I just wanted to provide a starting point for the search.
- Bioinformatics
- Omics
- Biochemistry
- Prokaryote biology
- Eukaryote biology
- Virology
- Medicine
- 3D bioprinting
Bioinformatics-aware Neural Network Interpretation - it would be very interesting to get pieces of evidence for and against a biological hypothesis from a trained neural network. There are some methods to interpret NNs but most of them are concerned only with vision tasks. Most works here provide LOGO sequences like DeepMotif (look for pytorch implementation here) but something more understandable would be good to have.
Prediction of response to psychopharma - there is some research but pretty recent and not much.
Proper visualization of long DNA sequences - it would be nice to have an understandable visualization of long DNA sequences. Some good attempts are available in this library.
RNN instead of HMMs - there are many applications of HMMs in Bioinformatics (classic example is multiple sequence alignment) but RNNs have pretty much the same properties while being way stronger as sequence modellers. Don't see much of RNN application in lieu of HMMs in Bioinf though. Maybe Transformers would be helpful as well?
Functions of genes - from about 20k of known human genes we somewhat know a function of about 5k (update: 10k). Imagine the situation for other species.
Metagenomics of clouds - metagenomics is a fast growing approach in modern biology. Investigation of microbial community of atmosphere (for example clouds) is very interesting and not fully understood field of microbiology.
Oxygen-resistant nitrogenases anyone? There could be a very promising application in industry since the current way of nitrogen fixation is quite compicated. There was a paper twenty years ago with claims of finding such nitrogenase but current results contradict it.
Light detection in bacteria - how does it work?
Larvamima - ant parasytes that mimic the larvae. After the discovery about 30 years ago only twelve mentions in reviews.
Mimicry in plants - quite self-explanatory. There are a number of examples (rice and Echinochloa crus-galli, fallen leaves and Monotropsis oderata) but it still remains pretty unclear.
Myrmecophilidae - live almost everywhere where ants do, no assembled genomes, no research on their ecology and molecular biology.
Archaeal virii - morphology differences from bacteriophages and eukaryote virii. Are there any archaeal virii with hybrid RNA-DNA genome?
Fungal virii - Why they are so often non-pathogenic for their hosts?
Streptococcus mutans vaccine - how to evict the stuff that eats your teeth. There is some research but no known solution yet.
Reproducibility of directed collagen strand growth - it is hard to grow collagen strands with directed linear growth (usually they tend to grow chaotically). Different papers offer different solutions and different results even for similar experiment conditions.
Original list - includes many fields (Math, Physics etc).
Open questions: CRISPR biology - review of open questions in CRISPR by Eugene Koonin
Wiki list of unsolved problems in biology - note that unsolved doesn't imply under-investigated.
Not yet awesome Rust - list similar to the current one only about Rust language ecosystem.
Blog post on under-investigated topics in ecology - on non-stationarity and related stuff.
Talk on challenges in Synthetic Biology - mostly technical like standardisation, not conceptual ones.
Fresh review of Deep Learning in Biomed - with focus on obstacles, rather good.
OpenAI requests for research - a list of requests to research in machine learning by OpenAI.
Open problems in Robotics - a list of unsolved problems in Robotics.
Research questions deemed to have a big social impact - a list with probably important questions for 19 fields.