GEN Magazine
Multiverse concepts divide philosophers and physicists, but they unify biologists, who have the advantage of studying phenomena that occur at relatively convenient scales. By and large, biologists can ignore subatomic or cosmological questions. Instead, they can pay attention to phenomena that occur at (or close to) the scale of living cells. Each individual cell, biologists have found, contains multiple worlds: collections of genes, RNA transcripts, proteins, and so on. Fortunately, each collection—each “ome”—is near to hand, unlike quantum mechanical fluctuations or wrinkles in space-time. And as the cover story in the February issue of GEN relates, multiple omes can be analyzed simultaneously with the aid of multiomic single-cell platforms. Beyond the cover story, this month’s GEN covers stem-cell-based diabetes treatments, biocomputing advances, and the development of COVID-19-fighting antiviral combinations. Last but not least, GEN presents an “A-List” of the top RNA-based biopharma companies.