Before we launch into the new year, we are taking a moment to reflect on 2025, including the rising trends we observed and the new feature types we introduced on BioTechniques.com, before wrapping up with our top content from the year. 2025: Under the microscope 2025 saw a dramatic expansion of AI and machine learning techniques in life science research approaches, perhaps best evidenced in the field of multiomics and it’s integration with spatial techniques. Over the last 20 years, this field has been buoyed by the continual release of new technologies capable of obtaining detailed information from multiple omic modalities, sometimes simultaneously. What’s more, in recent years, the spatial capacity of these techniques has expanded dramatically, adding an additional level of context and detail with which to identify patterns and interrogate the underlying principles of basic biology and disease states. However, managing, aligning and drawing connections between the large amount of resultant data from multiple omic realms has presented a continual challenge to the field. Here is a problem seemingly tailor made for AI to solve, and the subsequent explosion of developments in this space has shown an increasing trend for multiomic and spatial hardware to come packaged with their own AI-enabled analysis software. This was abundantly clear when we attended The annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (IL, USA) in April last year, and it formed the core narrative of our article, ‘A research revolution: multiomic and spatial techniques in cancer biology’. All this new…
