ABOVE: © The Scientist Staff
We know the old saw: necessity is the mother of invention. Well, 2020 has shown us that a global pandemic is one serious mother. Typically, our Top 10 Innovations competition focuses on laboratory technologies, tools designed to plumb the mysteries of basic biology. But as biologists turned their sights to understanding SARS-CoV-2, the innovation landscape changed accordingly, with new tools developed and existing technologies bent to address the pandemic. So this year at The Scientist, our annual contest incorporates inventions aimed at understanding and ultimately solving the COVID-19 problem.
Among our independent judges’ picks for 2020’s Top 10 Innovations were core laboratory technologies—such as a single-cell proteome analyzer and a desktop gene synthesizer—alongside pandemic-focused products, including a rapid COVID-19 test, a tool that can capture antibody profiles from the blood plasma of convalescing coronavirus patients, and a platform for characterizing glycans in the spike protein ...
