research paper topics in biology

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Published by Robert Bruce at August 29th, 2023 , Revised On September 5, 2023

Biology Research Topics

Are you in need of captivating and achievable research topics within the field of biology? Your quest for the best biology topics ends right here as this article furnishes you with 100 distinctive and original concepts for biology research, laying the groundwork for your research endeavor.

Table of Contents

Our proficient researchers have thoughtfully curated these biology research themes, considering the substantial body of literature accessible and the prevailing gaps in research.

Should none of these topics elicit enthusiasm, our specialists are equally capable of proposing tailor-made research ideas in biology, finely tuned to cater to your requirements.

Thus, without further delay, we present our compilation of biology research topics crafted to accommodate students and researchers.

Research Topics in Marine Biology

Impact of climate change on coral reef ecosystems.
Biodiversity and adaptation of deep-sea organisms.
Effects of pollution on marine life and ecosystems.
Role of marine protected areas in conserving biodiversity.
Microplastics in marine environments: sources, impacts, and mitigation.

Biological Anthropology Research Topics

Evolutionary implications of early human migration patterns.
Genetic and environmental factors influencing human height variation.
Cultural evolution and its impact on human societies.
Paleoanthropological insights into human dietary adaptations.
Genetic diversity and population history of indigenous communities.

Biological Psychology Research Topics

Neurobiological basis of addiction and its treatment.
Impact of stress on brain structure and function.
Genetic and environmental influences on mental health disorders.
Neural mechanisms underlying emotions and emotional regulation.
Role of the gut-brain axis in psychological well-being.

Cancer Biology Research Topics

Targeted therapies in precision cancer medicine.
Tumor microenvironment and its influence on cancer progression.
Epigenetic modifications in cancer development and therapy.
Immune checkpoint inhibitors and their role in cancer immunotherapy.
Early detection and diagnosis strategies for various types of cancer.

Cell Biology Research Topics

Mechanisms of autophagy and its implications in health and disease.
Intracellular transport and organelle dynamics in cell function.
Role of cell signaling pathways in cellular response to external stimuli.
Cell cycle regulation and its relevance to cancer development.
Cellular mechanisms of apoptosis and programmed cell death.

Developmental Biology Research Topics

Genetic and molecular basis of limb development in vertebrates.
Evolution of embryonic development and its impact on morphological diversity.
Stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine approaches.
Mechanisms of organogenesis and tissue regeneration in animals.
Role of non-coding RNAs in developmental processes.

Human Biology Research Topics

Genetic factors influencing susceptibility to infectious diseases.
Human microbiome and its impact on health and disease.
Genetic basis of rare and common human diseases.
Genetic and environmental factors contributing to aging.
Impact of lifestyle and diet on human health and longevity.

Molecular Biology Research Topics

CRISPR-Cas gene editing technology and its applications.
Non-coding RNAs as regulators of gene expression.
Role of epigenetics in gene regulation and disease.
Mechanisms of DNA repair and genome stability.
Molecular basis of cellular metabolism and energy production.

Research Topics in Biology for Undergraduates

41. Investigating the effects of pollutants on local plant species.
Microbial diversity and ecosystem functioning in a specific habitat.
Understanding the genetics of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
Impact of urbanization on bird populations and biodiversity.
Investigating the role of pheromones in insect communication.

Synthetic Biology Research Topics

Design and construction of synthetic biological circuits.
Synthetic biology applications in biofuel production.
Ethical considerations in synthetic biology research and applications.
Synthetic biology approaches to engineering novel enzymes.
Creating synthetic organisms with modified functions and capabilities.

Animal Biology Research Topics

Evolution of mating behaviors in animal species.
Genetic basis of color variation in butterfly wings.
Impact of habitat fragmentation on amphibian populations.
Behavior and communication in social insect colonies.
Adaptations of marine mammals to aquatic environments.

Best Biology Research Topics

Unraveling the mysteries of circadian rhythms in organisms.
Investigating the ecological significance of cryptic coloration.
Evolution of venomous animals and their prey.
The role of endosymbiosis in the evolution of eukaryotic cells.
Exploring the potential of extremophiles in biotechnology.

Biological Psychology Research Paper Topics

Neurobiological mechanisms underlying memory formation.
Impact of sleep disorders on cognitive function and mental health.
Biological basis of personality traits and behavior.
Neural correlates of emotions and emotional disorders.
Role of neuroplasticity in brain recovery after injury.

Biological Science Research Topics:

Role of gut microbiota in immune system development.
Molecular mechanisms of gene regulation during development.
Impact of climate change on insect population dynamics.
Genetic basis of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Evolutionary relationships among vertebrate species based on DNA analysis.

Biology Education Research Topics

Effectiveness of inquiry-based learning in biology classrooms.
Assessing the impact of virtual labs on student understanding of biology concepts.
Gender disparities in science education and strategies for closing the gap.
Role of outdoor education in enhancing students’ ecological awareness.
Integrating technology in biology education: challenges and opportunities.

Biology-Related Research Topics

The intersection of ecology and economics in conservation planning.
Molecular basis of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria.
Implications of genetic modification of crops for food security.
Evolutionary perspectives on cooperation and altruism in animal behavior.
Environmental impacts of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Biology Research Proposal Topics

Investigating the role of microRNAs in cancer progression.
Exploring the effects of pollution on aquatic biodiversity.
Developing a gene therapy approach for a genetic disorder.
Assessing the potential of natural compounds as anti-inflammatory agents.
Studying the molecular basis of cellular senescence and aging.

Biology Research Topic Ideas

Role of pheromones in insect mate selection and behavior.
Investigating the molecular basis of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Impact of climate change on plant-pollinator interactions.
Genetic diversity and conservation of endangered species.
Evolutionary patterns in mimicry and camouflage in organisms.

Biology Research Topics for Undergraduates

Effects of different fertilizers on plant growth and soil health.
Investigating the biodiversity of a local freshwater ecosystem.
Evolutionary origins of a specific animal adaptation.
Genetic diversity and disease susceptibility in human populations.
Role of specific genes in regulating the immune response.

Cell and Molecular Biology Research Topics

Molecular mechanisms of DNA replication and repair.
Role of microRNAs in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
Investigating the cell cycle and its control mechanisms.
Molecular basis of mitochondrial diseases and therapies.
Cellular responses to oxidative stress and their implications in ageing.

These topics cover a broad range of subjects within biology, offering plenty of options for research projects. Remember that you can further refine these topics based on your specific interests and research goals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some good research topics in biology?

A good research topic in biology will address a specific problem in any of the several areas of biology, such as marine biology, molecular biology, cellular biology, animal biology, or cancer biology.

A topic that enables you to investigate a problem in any area of biology will help you make a meaningful contribution.

How to choose a research topic in biology?

Choosing a research topic in biology is simple.

Follow the steps:

Generate potential topics.
Consider your areas of knowledge and personal passions.
Conduct a thorough review of existing literature.
Evaluate the practicality and viability.
Narrow down and refine your research query.
Remain receptive to new ideas and suggestions.

Who Are We?

For several years, Research Prospect has been offering students around the globe complimentary research topic suggestions. We aim to assist students in choosing a research topic that is both suitable and feasible for their project, leading to the attainment of their desired grades. Explore how our services, including research proposal writing , dissertation outline creation, and comprehensive thesis writing , can contribute to your college’s success.

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150 Actual Biology Research Paper Topics

Table of contents

1 What Is Biology? What Topics Might Biologists Study?
2 How to Choose a Topic for Biology Research Paper?
3.1 15 Developmental Biology Topics For Research
3.2 15 Immune System Biology Research Topics
3.3 15 Cell Biology Research Topics
3.4 15 DNA Research Topics
3.5 15 Molecular Biology Research Topics
3.6 15 Neurobiology Research Topics
3.7 15 Abortion, Human cloning, and Genetic Researches Topics
3.8 15 Environmental and Ecology Topics for Your Research
3.9 15 Plant Pathology Biology Research Topics
3.10 15 Animals Biology Research Topics
3.11 15 Marine Biology Research Topics
3.12 15 Zoology Research Topics
3.13 15 Genetics Research Topics
3.14 15 Biotechnology Research Topics
3.15 15 Evolutionary Biology Research Topics

Biology is one of the most magnetic fields of study these days. If you want to be a biologist or scientist in the future, there is no better time to start than right now. Biology research topics covered in this article will keep you busy and interested. Writing a research paper is one of the best ways to dip your toes into the field. Before doing that, you need to know some good topics for the research paper . They should be suitable for biology students rather than cutting-edge researchers. On Papersowl.com , we provide as many biology research paper examples as possible so that you have a huge choice.

What Is Biology? What Topics Might Biologists Study?

Biology is simply the study of everything that has a form of life. It includes investigations on plants, animals, and everything found in the environment. It is about studying how life forms grow, develop, and interact with each other. Biology essay topics for research encompass all these and more.

This science uncovers many fields where various life forms are studied. It makes sense to look through these fields to help you decide which suits you the best.

Plant Biology research topics are about studying the plants around us. They disclose information about their existence as a part of the ecosystem, their life cycle, resources they can give us, their ability to preserve them from climate changes, and so on. There are many ideas to choose from, but you must focus on a specific one.

Human Biology research topics are all about us. These topics focus on different body parts, such as the human brain, the human immunological system, the nervous system, etc. In addition, you can discuss DNA modifications in humans and explain why genetic disorders occur in your research projects. Various cell research is also common today.

Biology research topics on the environment are in great demand too. For example, climate change is becoming a more significant threat every day. By studying environmental topics in biology for projects and research, we can come up with ways to combat them and preserve ecosystems.

Microbiology research topics delve into things we can’t see. There are trillions of microbes and bacteria all around us. Knowing about them is essential to understanding what makes us sick and how to fight against them. All microbiology research paper topics are pretty complicated yet very engaging to include in your paper research.

Molecular biology topics dive even deeper into the level of atoms and molecules. The various medicines and drugs we take were all created through molecular-biology research. It is one of the areas full of ideas, but there is yet to be much evidence. Science is advancing in this realm but still needs a lot of time. Topics of molecular biology will need days for research only.

Keep in mind that there are more ideas and variations of this science. We offer more examples in further sections of the article about developmental biology, marine biology, evolutionary biology, etc. Explore them and make your writing appealing and meaningful in the eyes of a professor.

How to Choose a Topic for Biology Research Paper?

When choosing a biology project topic, you must be aware of one or more fields of science. Biology research is critical to the present world. By doing research, we can learn more about genetic disorders, immune disorders, mental health, natural disease resistance, etc. Knowing about each of these could save lives in the future.

For those who may not have the time or resources to do their own research, there are research paper writing services that can provide assistance with the project. And we are always here to help you find your own topic among interesting biology research topics. Here we prepared some useful tips to follow.

Tip 1: The level of interest matters Pay attention to one that interests you, and you might have ideas on how to develop the topic. Passion is fundamental in research, after all.
Tip 2: Explore the topic Try to narrow things down a bit. If the topic is too broad, you may not be able to cover all aspects of it in one research paper. If it is too narrow, the paper could end up too short. Analyze the topic and the ways to approach it. By doing so, you can strike a balance between the two.
Tip 3: Discover the recent developments To make your research paper touchable with the present day, you must explore the latest developments in the field. You can find out what kind of research has been done recently by looking at journals. Check out research papers, topics, research articles, and other sources.
Tip 4: Ensure to get enough resources When choosing a topic, make sure it has plenty of resources available. For example, a research paper on xenobiology or cutting-edge nanobiology might sound attractive. Still, you might have difficulties getting data and resources for those unless you are a researcher at a government lab. Data, resources, complex numbers, and statistics are all invaluable to writing a paper about these topics.

That is why we have selected a range of biological topics. The topics on this list are all hopefully exciting topics for research you could write an excellent paper on. We should also add that easy biology topics to research are rare, and a writer usually needs days to prepare and start writing. Yes, biology research topics for high school students are a bit easier, but still, they need time to explore them.

On the other hand, biology research topics for college students are far more complex and detailed. Some people prefer evolutionary biology research paper topics, and we can agree with this claim. These research areas do have a lot of potential and a lot of data to support the claims. Others prefer cell biology research topics that are a bit specific and fun. Anyway, with this article’s list of easy biology research topics, you will surely find the one matching your interest.

For those who may not have the time or resources to do their own research, there are provide assistance with the project.

15 Developmental Biology Topics For Research

Exploring the processes of how cells grow and develop is exciting. The human body contains millions of cells, and it’s interesting to research their behavior under different conditions. If you feel like writing about it, you can find some interesting biology topics below.

How do stem cells form different tissues?
How are tumors formed?
Duplication of genomes
Plasticity of development
Different birth defects
Interactions between genes and the environment
Anticancer drugs mixtures
Developmental diseases: Origin
Drosophila Oogenesis
Most deadly viruses
Most deadly bacteria in the world
How do germs affect cells?
How does leukemia start?
Development of the cardiovascular system in children
How do autoimmune diseases start and affect the human body?

15 Immune System Biology Research Topics

For decades, many scientists and immunologists have studied the human immune system and tried to explain its reaction to various pathogens. This area allows you to deepen into it and reveal how a body protects itself from harmful impact. Look over the biology research questions below and find your match-up.

How does the human body’s immune system work?
The human immune system: How to strengthen it?
What makes the immunological system weaker?
The notion of auto-immune diseases and their effect on the body’s immune system
The global HIV/aids epidemic
What methods are used to prevent the spread of hives?
Living with auto-immune diseases
Genetics and the immune system: effects and consequences
How do immune disorders affect the body, and what causes them?
Are allergies signs of worrying about an immune disorder?
DNA modification in solving immune disorders
Stress as the biggest ruiner of the immunological system
Vaccines as strong supporters of the immunological system
The perception of vaccines in society
Why do some people refuse vaccines and put others around them in danger?

15 Cell Biology Research Topics

Cell study might seem challenging yet very engaging. It will be a good idea to compare various types of cells and compare them in animals and plants. Make your choice from the list of cell biology research topics below.

The structure of an animal cell
Mitochondria and its meaning in cell development
Cells classification and their functions
Red blood cells and their function in transporting oxygen
White blood cells and their responsibility to fight diseases
How are plant cells different from animal cells?
What would it be if animals had a function to photosynthesize?
Single-celled organisms: What is it, and how do they work?
What processes do cells go through in division?
Invasion of bacteria into the body
Viruses – alive or not?
Fungi: their reproduction and distribution
Cancer cells: Why are they so dangerous?
What methods are used to kill cancer cells?
The role of stem cells and their potential in a body

15 DNA Research Topics

The variety of biology research topics for college students might impress you a lot. This is a science with a large field of investigation, disclosing much scientific information to use in your project. The notion of DNA and its gist are also excellent options to write about.

The structure of the human DNA
The main components of a DNA chain
Why does DNA have a double-helix spiral structure?
The purpose of chromosomes
MRNA and its relation to DNA
Do single-celled organisms have DNA?
Do viruses have DNA?
What happens if you have too many or too few chromosomes?
Analyzing the structure of DNA using computers
Uses for the DNA of extinct organisms like mammoths and dinosaurs
Storing non-genetic information in DNA
Can you write a computer program into human DNA?
How does radiation affect DNA?
Modifying DNA to treat aids
Can we fight cancer through DNA modification?

15 Molecular Biology Research Topics

Do you prefer to research molecules’ chemical and physical composition? We gathered some molecular biology research topics to make your choice easier.

The structure and components of a gene
How do molecules move in and out of a cell?
The basic building blocks of life
How are drugs designed for humans?
How is a vaccine designed to target a specific disease?
Dominant genes vs. recessive genes
Prion disease – why is it so dangerous?
Hormones and their function in the body
Developing artificial hormones from other animals
How to carry out a western blot?
Testing and analyzing DNA using PCR
The three-dimensional structure of a molecule
What is DNA transcription, and how is it used?
The structure of a prion
What is the central dogma of molecular biology?

15 Neurobiology Research Topics

The more you dive into science, the more exciting things you find. That’s about biology. Here, you can choose biology research topics for high school and try to reveal more simply.

Nervous system: its structure and function
Neurons as unique cells playing a central role in the nervous system
What is the maximum reaction speed in a human?
Reaction speed: how to improve it?
Research on Organic Farming
What are the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease?
Why do we feel happy or sad?
Headaches in terms of Neurobiology
What are the reasons for neurobiological degeneration?
Myths and reality of Amnesia
What causes Alzheimer’s Disease, and what are the consequences of the disease?
What is the treatment for Spinal Cord Injury?
Studies on Narcolepsy and Insomnia: What are the causes?
Is there a connection between Mental Health and Neurobiology?
Emotions in terms of their reflection in the brain

15 Abortion, Human cloning, and Genetic Researches Topics

There are so many scientific researches and theories that society accepts or neglects. You can operate different notions and try to explain them, reflecting their advantages and downsides for a human being. We gathered some enticing life science research topics for high school students that might interest you.

The controversy around abortion: legal or not?
Can abortion be safe?
Human cloning – reality vs. science-fiction
The goals of cloning humans
Are human cloning and transplantation ethical?
Having a “perfect child” through gene therapy: Is it a myth?
How far has gene therapy gone in genetic research?
Advantages and disadvantages of gene therapy
How gene therapy can help beat cancer
How gene therapy can eliminate diabetes
The opportunity to edit genes by CRISPR
DNA modifications in humans to enhance our abilities – an ethical dilemma
Will expensive gene therapy widen the gap between the rich and the poor?
Cloning: the good and the Bad for a Generation
The disadvantages of cloning
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15 Environmental and Ecology Topics for Your Research

The nature around us is so enormous and includes many branches to investigate. If you are keen on the environment and how ecology affects it, the list of follow-up biology paper topics might be helpful to you.

The theory of evolution
How does natural selection work?
How do living organisms adapt to their environment?
The concept of divergent and convergent evolution
Building a sustainable environment
Development of environment-friendly cities
How to control population growth?
Why have recycling resources become so essential in the modern world?
The effect of plastic on the environment
What are the global consequences of deforestation?
What can we expect when losing biodiversity?
Ecological damage: How to prevent it?
How can GMO products affect ecology?
Cloning endangered or extinct species: Is it a good idea?
Is climate change the main reason for disrupting ecology?

15 Plant Pathology Biology Research Topics

Many factors impact human health and the quality of food products matters. These easy biology research topics will be useful if you want to describe the connection between those two concepts.

How do plants protect themselves from diseases?
How to increase the plant’s resistance to diseases?
Diseases distribution among plants
The banana pandemic
How do herbicides influence plants?
Corn blight
Can any plant diseases affect humans?
The issue of stem rust and its impact on wheat
What approaches are used to struggle against invasive plants and affected weeds?
Fertilizers: their pros and cons on plants
Plant disease genetics: its system and structure
What is the connection between ecological changes and plant diseases?
Modifications on food production because of plant diseases
How do fungal and viral diseases appear in plants?
The sweet potato virus

15 Animals Biology Research Topics

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like animals. If you are curious about animals scientifically, here you are with biology research paper topics in this field.

Classification of animals
Land-based life: its evolution history
Controversies about keeping animals as pets
Is it ethical to test drugs and products on animals?
Why do nature reserves against zoos?
Evidence on prehistoric aquatic animals growing giant
What species of animals are vegan?
Animals and their social behavior
Primate behavior
How intelligent can other primates be?
Are wolves and dogs intelligent?
Domesticating animals
Hibernation in animals
Why animals migrate
Should we bring back extinct animals?

15 Marine Biology Research Topics

The marine theme is engaging as it reveals so many interesting facts about life forms dwelling under the water. You can make your paper look captivating using biology topics in marine below.

How acidification affects aquatic environments
Evolution in the deep sea
What’s the meaning of camouflage mechanism in sea life?
Consequences of oil spills on marine life
Oldest marine species
How do whales communicate with each other?
How blind fish navigate
Are marine shows and aquariums ethical?
The biology and life cycle of seabirds
How jellyfish are immortal
Plankton ecology
Difference between freshwater and seawater marine life
Coral reefs: their importance and evolution
Saving and restoring coral reefs
Life in the deep-sea ocean trenches

15 Zoology Research Topics

Zoology can be an excellent choice to write about if you are close to animal studies. Look at biology topics to research and choose the one that fits your interest most.

Asian elephants and human speech patterns
Oyster genomes and adaptation
Darwin’s work in the Galápagos Islands
Asian carp: Invasive species analysis
Giant squids: Fact vs. fiction
Coyote and wolf hybrid species in the United States
Parasites and disease
Migration patterns of killer bees
The treatment of species in Melville’s Moby Dick
Biodiversity and plankton
The role of camels and the development of Africa and the Middle East
Muskellunge and adaptive creek mechanisms to small water
Ants and cooperative behavior among species
Animal communication and the origin of language
Speech in African Gray Parrots

15 Genetics Research Topics

Writing about modifications caused on the gene level is pretty challenging but very fascinating. You can select one among the biological questions for research and bring up a meaningful paper.

Genetics and its role in cancer studies
Can genetic code be confidential?
Is it possible to choose the sex of a person before birth?
Genetics as a ray of hope for children with an intellectual disability
What factors in human genetics affect behavior?
Is it somehow possible to improve human personality through genetics?
Are there any living cells in the gene?
Fighting HIV with gene mutations
Genetic mutations
How addictive substances affect genes
Genetic testing: is it necessary?
Cloning: positive or negative outcome for future generations
Pros and cons of genetic engineering
Is the world ready for the bioethics revolution?
The linkage between genetics and obesity

15 Biotechnology Research Topics

The way scientists conduct research today is magnificent. Implementing high-tech innovations in biology research brings new opportunities to study the world. What are these opportunities? Explore biotechnology research topics for college students and disclose the best options for you.

Biotechnology used in plant research
What is the contribution of biotechnology to food?
Pharmacogenetics: What is it, and how it works?
How are anti-cancer drugs produced to be effective?
Nanotechnology in DNA: How to isolate it?
Recent nanotechnology used in HIV treatment
What biotech apps are used to detect foodborne pathogens in food systems?
Genotypes research: Why are they tolerant and sensitive to heavy metal?
High-tech solutions in diagnosing cancer
Forensic DNA and its latest developments
Metabolic changes at the level of cells
Nanotechnology in improving treatments for respiratory viruses
The latest biotech discoveries
Digital evolution: bioresearch and its transformation
The concept of vaccine development

15 Evolutionary Biology Research Topics

Knowing how life forms started their existence is fundamental. And more interesting is to look through the evolution of many processes. If you find this trend of research more engaging, we outlined evolutionary biology research paper topics to diversify your choice.

Darwin’s concept’s impact on science
The evolution concept by Lamarck
Origins of the evolutionary theory
Evolution acceptance: a belief vs. a theory?
Evolutionary in microbiology
Development of robotics
Revealing differences: human brain & animal brain
Preservation of biological resources
Transformations in aging
Adaptive genetic system
Morphometrics’ history
Developmental theory and population genomics
Bacteria ecology’s evolution
Biological changes: impact and evolution
Infectious diseases and their profession

The world of science and biology is vast, making research tedious. Use our list of interesting biology research topics to choose the best issue to write your own paper.

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200+ Unique And Interesting Biology Research Topics For Students In 2023

Are you curious about the fascinating world of biology and its many research possibilities? Well, you are in the right place! In this blog, we will explore biology research topics, exploring what biology is, what constitutes a good research topic, and how to go about selecting the perfect one for your academic journey.

So, what exactly is biology? Biology is the study of living organisms and their interactions with the environment. It includes everything from the tiniest cells to the largest ecosystems, making it a diverse and exciting field of study.

Stay tuned to learn more about biology research topics as we present over 200 intriguing research ideas for students, emphasizing the importance of selecting the right one. In addition, we will also share resources to make your quest for the perfect topic a breeze. Let’s embark on this scientific journey together!

If you are having trouble with any kind of assignment or task, do not worry—we can give you the best microbiology assignment help at a value price. Additionally, you may look at nursing project ideas .

What Is Biology?

Table of Contents

Biology is the study of living things, like animals, plants, and even tiny organisms too small to see. It helps us understand how these living things work and how they interact with each other and their environment. Biologists, or scientists who study biology, explore topics like how animals breathe, how plants grow, and how our bodies function. By learning about biology, we can better care for the Earth and all its living creatures.

What Is A Good Biology Research Topic?

A good biology research topic is a question or problem in the field of biology that scientists want to investigate and learn more about. It should be interesting and important, like studying how a new medicine can treat a disease or how animals adapt to changing environments. The topic should also be specific and clear, so researchers can focus on finding answers. Additionally, it’s helpful if the topic hasn’t been studied extensively before, so the research can contribute new knowledge to the field of biology and help us better understand the natural world.

Tips For Choosing A Biology Research Topics

Here are some tips for choosing a biology research topics:

1. Choose What Interests You

When picking a biology research topic, go for something that you personally find fascinating and enjoyable. When you’re genuinely curious about it, you’ll be more motivated to study and learn.

2. Select a Significant Topic

Look for a subject in biology that has real-world importance. Think about whether your research can address practical issues, like finding cures for diseases or understanding environmental problems. Research that can make a positive impact is usually a good choice.

3. Check If It’s Doable

Consider if you have the necessary tools and time to carry out your research. It’s essential to pick a topic that you can actually study with the resources available to you.

4. Add Your Unique Perspective

Try to find a fresh or different angle for your research. While you can build upon existing knowledge, bringing something new or unique to the table can make your research more exciting and valuable.

5. Seek Guidance

Don’t hesitate to ask for advice from your teachers or experienced researchers. They can provide you with valuable insights and help you make a smart decision when choosing your research topic in biology.

Biology Research Topics For College Students

1. Investigating the role of genetic mutations in cancer development.

2. Analyzing the impact of climate changes on wildlife populations.

3. Studying the ecology of invasive species in urban environments.

4. Investigating the microbiome of the human gut and its relationship to health.

5. Analyzing the genetic diversity of endangered species for conservation.

6. Studying the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

7. Investigating the ecological consequences of deforestation.

8. Analyzing the behavior and communication of social insects like ants and bees.

9. Studying the physiology of extreme environments, such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

10. Investigating the molecular mechanisms of cell division and mitosis.

Plant Biology Research Topics For College Students

11. Studying the impact of different fertilizers on crop yields and soil health.

12. Analyzing the genetics of plant resistance to pests and diseases.

13. Investigating the role of plant hormones in growth and development.

14. Studying the adaptation of plants to drought conditions.

15. Analyzing the ecological interactions between plants and pollinators.

16. Investigating the use of biotechnology to enhance crop traits.

17. Studying the genetics of plant breeding for improved varieties.

18. Analyzing the physiology of photosynthesis and carbon fixation in plants.

19. Investigating the effects of soil microbiota on plant health.

20. Studying the evolution of plant species in response to changing environments.

Biotechnology Research Topics For College Students

21. Investigating the use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology for genome editing.

22. Analyzing the production of biofuels from microorganisms.

23. Studying the application of biotechnology in medicine, such as gene therapy.

24. Investigating the use of bioplastics as a sustainable alternative to conventional plastics.

25. Analyzing the role of biotechnology in food production, including GMOs.

26. Studying the development of biopharmaceuticals and monoclonal antibodies.

27. Investigating the use of bioremediation to clean up polluted environments.

28. Studying the potential of synthetic biology for creating novel organisms.

29. Analyzing the ethical and social implications of biotechnological advancements.

30. Investigating the use of biotechnology in forensic science, such as DNA analysis.

Molecular Biology Research Topics For Undergraduates

31. Studying the structure and function of DNA and RNA molecules.

32. Analyzing the regulation of gene expression in eukaryotic cells.

33. Investigating the mechanisms of DNA replication and repair.

34. Studying the role of non-coding RNAs in gene regulation.

35. Analyzing the molecular basis of genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis.

36. Investigating the epigenetic modifications that control gene activity.

37. Studying the molecular mechanisms of protein folding and misfolding.

38. Analyzing the molecular pathways involved in cancer progression.

39. Investigating the molecular basis of neurodegenerative diseases.

40. Studying the use of molecular markers in genetic diversity analysis.

Life Science Research Topics For High School Students

41. Investigating the effects of different diets on human health.

42. Analyzing the impact of exercise on cardiovascular fitness.

43. Studying the genetics of inherited traits and diseases.

44. Investigating the ecological interactions in a local ecosystem.

45. Analyzing the diversity of microorganisms in soil or water samples.

46. Studying the anatomy and physiology of a specific organ or system.

47. Investigating the life cycle of a local plant or animal species.

48. Studying the effects of environmental pollutants on aquatic organisms.

49. Analyzing the behavior of a specific animal species in its habitat.

50. Investigating the process of photosynthesis in plants.

Biology Research Topics For Grade 12

51. Investigating the genetic basis of a specific inherited disorder.

52. Analyzing the impact of climate change on a local ecosystem.

53.Studying the biodiversity of a particular rainforest region.

54. Investigating the physiological adaptations of animals to extreme temperatures.

55. Analyzing the effects of pollution on aquatic ecosystems.

56. Studying the life history and conservation status of an endangered species.

57. Investigating the molecular mechanisms of a specific disease.

58. Studying the ecological interactions within a coral reef ecosystem.

59. Analyzing the genetics of plant hybridization and speciation.

60. Investigating the behavior and communication of a particular bird species.

Marine Biology Research Topics

61. Studying the impact of ocean acidification on coral reefs.

62. Analyzing the migration patterns of marine mammals.

63. Investigating the physiology of deep-sea creatures under high pressure.

64. Studying the ecology of phytoplankton and their role in the marine food web.

65. Analyzing the behavior of different species of sharks.

66. Investigating the conservation of sea turtle populations.

67. Studying the biodiversity of deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities.

68. Analyzing the effects of overfishing on marine ecosystems.

69. Investigating the adaptation of marine organisms to extreme cold in polar regions.

70. Studying the bioluminescence and communication in marine organisms.

AP Biology Research Topics

71. Investigating the role of specific enzymes in cellular metabolism.

72. Analyzing the genetic variation within a population.

73. Studying the mechanisms of hormonal regulation in animals.

74. Investigating the principles of Mendelian genetics through trait analysis.

75. Analyzing the ecological succession in a local ecosystem.

76. Studying the physiology of the human circulatory system.

77. Investigating the molecular biology of a specific virus.

78. Studying the principles of natural selection through evolutionary simulations.

79. Analyzing the genetic diversity of a plant species in different habitats.

80. Investigating the effects of different environmental factors on plant growth.

Cell Biology Research Topics

81. Investigating the role of mitochondria in cellular energy production.

82. Analyzing the mechanisms of cell division and mitosis.

83. Studying the function of cell membrane proteins in signal transduction.

84. Investigating the cellular processes involved in apoptosis (cell death).

85. Analyzing the role of endoplasmic reticulum in protein synthesis and folding.

86. Studying the dynamics of the cytoskeleton and cell motility.

87. Investigating the regulation of cell cycle checkpoints.

88. Analyzing the structure and function of cellular organelles.

89. Studying the molecular mechanisms of DNA replication and repair.

90. Investigating the impact of cellular stress on cell health and function.

Human Biology Research Topics

91. Analyzing the genetic basis of inherited diseases in humans.

92. Investigating the physiological responses to exercise and physical activity.

93. Studying the hormonal regulation of the human reproductive system.

94. Analyzing the impact of nutrition on human health and metabolism.

95. Investigating the role of the immune system in disease prevention.

96. Studying the genetics of human evolution and migration.

97. Analyzing the neural mechanisms underlying human cognition and behavior.

98. Investigating the molecular basis of aging and age-related diseases.

99. Studying the impact of environmental toxins on human health.

100. Analyzing the genetics of organ transplantation and tissue compatibility.

Molecular Biology Research Topics

101. Investigating the role of microRNAs in gene regulation.

102. Analyzing the molecular basis of genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis.

103. Studying the epigenetic modifications that control gene expression.

104. Investigating the molecular mechanisms of RNA splicing.

105. Analyzing the role of telomeres in cellular aging.

106. Studying the molecular pathways involved in cancer metastasis.

107. Investigating the molecular basis of neurodegenerative diseases.

108. Studying the molecular interactions in protein-protein networks.

109. Analyzing the molecular mechanisms of DNA damage and repair.

110. Investigating the use of CRISPR-Cas9 for genome editing.

Animal Biology Research Topics

111. Studying the behavior and communication of social insects like ants.

112. Analyzing the physiology of hibernation in mammals.

113. Investigating the ecological interactions in a predator-prey relationship.

114. Studying the adaptations of animals to extreme environments.

115. Analyzing the genetics of inherited traits in animal populations.

116. Investigating the impact of climate change on animal migration patterns.

117. Studying the diversity of marine life in coral reef ecosystems.

118. Analyzing the physiology of flight in birds and bats.

119. Investigating the molecular basis of animal coloration and camouflage.

120. Studying the behavior and conservation of endangered species.

Neuroscience Research Topics
Mental Health Research Topics

Plant Biology Research Topics

121. Investigating the role of plant hormones in growth and development.

122. Analyzing the genetics of plant resistance to pests and diseases.

123. Climate change and plant phenology are being examined.

124. Investigating the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi and their symbiosis with plants.

125. Investigating plant photosynthesis and carbon fixing.

126. Molecular analysis of plant stress responses.

127. Investigating the adaptation of plants to drought conditions.

128. Studying the role of plants in phytoremediation of polluted environments.

129. Analyzing the genetics of plant hybridization and speciation.

130. Investigating the molecular basis of plant-microbe interactions.

Environmental Biology Research Topics

131. Analyzing the effects of pollution on aquatic ecosystems.

132. Investigating the biodiversity of a particular ecosystem.

133. Studying the ecological consequences of deforestation.

134. Analyzing the impact of climate change on wildlife populations.

135. Investigating the use of bioremediation to clean up polluted sites.

136. Studying the environmental factors influencing species distribution.

137. Analyzing the effects of habitat fragmentation on wildlife.

138. Investigating the ecology of invasive species in new environments.

139. Studying the conservation of endangered species and habitats.

140. Analyzing the interactions between humans and urban ecosystems.

Chemical Biology Research Topics

141. Investigating the design and synthesis of new drug compounds.

142. Analyzing the molecular mechanisms of enzyme catalysis.

143.Studying the role of small molecules in cellular signaling pathways.

144. Investigating the development of chemical probes for biological research.

145. Studying the chemistry of protein-ligand interactions.

146. Analyzing the use of chemical biology in cancer therapy.

147. Investigating the synthesis of bioactive natural products.

148. Studying the role of chemical compounds in microbial interactions.

149. Analyzing the chemistry of DNA-protein interactions.

150. Investigating the chemical basis of drug resistance in pathogens.

Medical Biology Research Topics

151. Investigating the genetic basis of specific diseases like diabetes.

152. Analyzing the mechanisms of drug resistance in bacteria.

153. Studying the molecular mechanisms of autoimmune diseases.

154. Investigating the development of personalized medicine approaches.

155. Studying the role of inflammation in chronic diseases.

156. Analyzing the genetics of rare diseases and genetic syndromes.

157. Investigating the molecular basis of viral infections and vaccines.

158. Studying the mechanisms of organ transplantation and rejection.

159. Analyzing the molecular diagnostics of cancer.

160. Investigating the biology of stem cells and regenerative medicine.

Evolutionary Biology Research Topics

161. Studying the evolution of human ancestors and early hominids.

162. The genetic variety of species and between species is being looked at.

163. Investigating the role of sexual selection in animal evolution.

164. Studying the co-evolutionary relationships between parasites and hosts.

165. Analyzing the evolutionary adaptations of extremophiles.

166. Investigating the evolution of developmental processes (evo-devo).

167. Studying the biogeography and distribution of species.

168. Analyzing the evolution of mimicry in animals and plants.

169. Investigating the genetics of speciation and hybridization.

170. Studying the evolutionary history of domesticated plants and animals.

Cellular Biology Research Topics

171. Investigating the role of autophagy in cellular homeostasis.

172. Analyzing the mechanisms of cellular transport and trafficking.

173. Studying the regulation of cell adhesion & migration.

174. Investigating the cellular responses to DNA damage.

175. Analyzing the dynamics of cellular membrane structures.

176. Studying the role of cellular organelles in lipid metabolism.

177. Investigating the molecular mechanisms of cell-cell communication.

178. Studying the physiology of cellular respiration and energy production.

179. Analyzing the cellular mechanisms of viral entry and replication.

180. Investigating the role of cellular senescence in aging and disease.

Good Biology Research Topics Related To Brain Injuries

181. Analyzing the molecular mechanisms of traumatic brain injury.

182. Investigating the role of neuroinflammation in brain injury recovery.

183. Studying the impact of concussions on long-term brain health.

184. Analyzing the use of neuroimaging in diagnosing brain injuries.

185. Investigating the development of neuroprotective therapies.

186. Studying the genetics of susceptibility to brain injuries.

187. Analyzing the cognitive and behavioral effects of brain trauma.

188. Investigating the role of rehabilitation in brain injury recovery.

189. Studying the cellular and molecular changes in axonal injury.

190. Looking into how stem cell therapy might be used to help brain injuries.

Biology Quantitative Research Topics

191. Investigating the mathematical modeling of population dynamics.

192. Analyzing the statistical methods for biodiversity assessment.

193. Studying the use of bioinformatics in genomics research.

194. Investigating the quantitative analysis of gene expression data.

195. Studying the mathematical modeling of enzyme kinetics.

196. Analyzing the statistical approaches for epidemiological studies.

197. Investigating the use of computational tools in phylogenetics.

198. Studying the mathematical modeling of ecological systems.

199. Analyzing the quantitative analysis of protein-protein interactions.

200. Investigating the statistical methods for analyzing genetic variation.

Importance Of Choosing The Right Biology Research Topics

Here are some importance of choosing the right biology research topics:

1. Relevance to Your Interests and Goals

Choosing the right biology research topic is important because it should align with your interests and goals. Studying something you’re passionate about keeps you motivated and dedicated to your research.

2. Contribution to Scientific Knowledge

Your research should contribute something valuable to the world of science. Picking the right topic means you have the chance to discover something new or solve a problem, advancing our understanding of the natural world.

3. Availability of Resources

Consider the resources you have or can access. If you pick a topic that demands resources you don’t have, your research may hit a dead end. Choosing wisely means you can work efficiently.

4. Feasibility and Manageability

A good research topic should be manageable within your time frame and capabilities. If it’s too broad or complex, you might get overwhelmed. Picking the right topic ensures your research is doable.

5. Real-World Impact

Think about how your research might benefit the real world. Biology often has implications for health, the environment, or society. Choosing a topic with practical applications can make your work meaningful and potentially change lives.

Resources For Finding Biology Research Topics

There are numerous resources for finding biology research topics:

1. Online Databases

Look on websites like PubMed and Google Scholar. They have lots of biology articles. Type words about what you like to find topics.

2. Academic Journals

Check biology magazines. They talk about new research. You can find ideas and see what’s important.

3. University Websites

Colleges show what their teachers study. Find teachers who like what you like. Ask them about ideas for your own study.

4. Science News and Magazines

Read science news. They tell you about new things in biology. It helps you think of research ideas.

5. Join Biology Forums and Communities

Talk to other people who like biology online. You can ask for ideas and find friends to help you. Use websites like ResearchGate and Reddit for this.

Conclusion

Biology Research Topics offer exciting opportunities for exploration and learning. We’ve explained what biology is and stressed the importance of picking a good research topic. Our tips and extensive list of over 200 biology research topics provide valuable guidance for students.

Selecting the right topic is more than just getting good grades; it’s about making meaningful contributions to our understanding of life. We’ve also shared resources to help you discover even more topics. So, embrace the world of biology research, embark on a journey of discovery, and be part of the ongoing effort to unravel the mysteries of the natural world.

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49 Most Interesting Biology Research Topics

August 21, 2023

In need of the perfect biology research topics—ideas that can both showcase your intellect and fuel your academic success? Lost in the boundless landscape of possible biology topics to research? And afraid you’ll never get a chance to begin writing your paper, let alone finish writing? Whether you’re a budding biologist hoping for a challenge or a novice seeking easy biology research topics to wade into, this blog offers curated and comprehensible options.

And if you’re a high school or transfer student looking for opportunities to immerse yourself in biology, consider learning more about research opportunities for high school students , top summer programs for high school students , best colleges for studying biomedical engineering , and best colleges for studying biology .

What is biology?

Well, biology explores the web of life that envelops our planet, from the teeny-tiny microbes to the big complex ecosystems. Biology investigates the molecular processes that define existence, deciphers the interplay of genes, and examines all the dynamic ways organisms interact with their environments. And through biology, you can gain not only knowledge, but a deeper appreciation for the interconnectedness of all living things. Pretty cool!

There are lots and lots of sub-disciplines within biology, branching out in all directions. Throughout this list, we won’t follow all of those branches, but we will follow many. And while none of these branches are truly simple or easy, some might be easier than others. Now we’ll take a look at a few various biology research topics and example questions that could pique your curiosity.

Climate change and ecosystems

The first of our potentially easy biology research topics: climate change and ecosystems. Investigate how ecosystems respond and adapt to the changing climate. And learn about shifts in species distributions , phenology , and ecological interactions .

1) How are different ecosystems responding to temperature changes and altered precipitation patterns?2) What are the implications of shifts in species distributions for ecosystem stability and functioning?

2) Or how does phenology change in response to climate shifts? And how do those changes impact species interactions?

3) Which underlying genetic and physiological mechanisms enable certain species to adapt to changing climate conditions?

4) And how do changing climate conditions affect species’ abilities to interact and form mutualistic relationships within ecosystems?

Microbiome and human health

Intrigued by the relationship between the gut and the rest of the body? Study the complex microbiome . You could learn how gut microbes influence digestion, immunity, and even mental health.

5) How do specific gut microbial communities impact nutrient absorption?

6) What are the connections between the gut microbiome, immune system development, and susceptibility to autoimmune diseases?

7) What ethical considerations need to be addressed when developing personalized microbiome-based therapies? And how can these therapies be safely and equitably integrated into clinical practice?

8) Or how do variations in the gut microbiome contribute to mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression?

9) How do changes in diet and lifestyle affect the composition and function of the gut microbiome? And what are the subsequent health implications?

Urban biodiversity conservation

Next, here’s another one of the potentially easy biology research topics. Examine the challenges and strategies for conserving biodiversity in urban environments. Consider the impact of urbanization on native species and ecosystem services. Then investigate the decline of pollinators and its implications for food security or ecosystem health.

10) How does urbanization influence the abundance and diversity of native plant and animal species in cities?

11) Or what are effective strategies for creating and maintaining green spaces that support urban biodiversity and ecosystem services?

12) How do different urban design and planning approaches impact the distribution of wildlife species and their interactions?

13) What are the best practices for engaging urban communities in biodiversity conservation efforts?

14) And how can urban agriculture and rooftop gardens contribute to urban biodiversity conservation while also addressing food security challenges?

Bioengineering

Are you a problem solver at heart? Then try approaching the intersection of engineering, biology, and medicine. Delve into the field of synthetic biology , where researchers engineer biological systems to create novel organisms with useful applications.

15) How can synthetic biology be harnessed to develop new, sustainable sources of biofuels from engineered microorganisms?

16) And what ethical considerations arise when creating genetically modified organisms for bioremediation purposes?

17) Can synthetic biology techniques be used to design plants that are more efficient at withdrawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

18) How can bioengineering create organisms capable of producing valuable pharmaceutical compounds in a controlled and sustainable manner?

19) But what are the potential risks and benefits of using engineered organisms for large-scale environmental cleanup projects?

Neurobiology

Interested in learning more about what makes creatures tick? Then this might be one of your favorite biology topics to research. Explore the neural mechanisms that underlie complex behaviors in animals and humans. Shed light on topics like decision-making, social interactions, and addiction. And investigate how brain plasticity and neurogenesis help the brain adapt to learning, injury, and aging.

20) How does the brain’s reward circuitry influence decision-making processes in situations involving risk and reward?

21) What neural mechanisms underlie empathy and social interactions in both humans and animals?

22) Or how do changes in neural plasticity contribute to age-related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases?

23) Can insights from neurobiology inform the development of more effective treatments for addiction and substance abuse?

24) What are the neural correlates of learning and memory? And how can our understanding of these processes be applied to educational strategies?

Plant epigenomics

While this might not be one of the easy biology research topics, it will appeal to plant enthusiasts. Explore how epigenetic modifications in plants affect their ability to respond and adapt to changing environmental conditions.

25) How do epigenetic modifications influence the expression of stress-related genes in plants exposed to temperature fluctuations?

26) Or what role do epigenetic changes play in plants’ abilities to acclimate to changing levels of air pollution?

27) Can certain epigenetic modifications be used as indicators of a plant’s adaptability to new environments?

28) How do epigenetic modifications contribute to the transgenerational inheritance of traits related to stress resistance?

29) And can targeted manipulation of epigenetic marks enhance crop plants’ ability to withstand changing environmental conditions?

Conservation genomics

Motivated to save the planet? Conservation genomics stands at the forefront of modern biology, merging the power of genetics with the urgent need to protect Earth’s biodiversity. Study genetic diversity, population dynamics, and how endangered species adapt in response to environmental changes.

30) How does genetic diversity within endangered species influence their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions?

31) What genetic factors contribute to the susceptibility of certain populations to diseases, and how can this knowledge inform conservation strategies?

32) How can genomic data be used to inform captive breeding and reintroduction programs for endangered species?

33) And what are the genomic signatures of adaptation in response to human-induced environmental changes, such as habitat fragmentation and pollution?

34) Or how can genomics help identify “hotspots” of biodiversity that are particularly important for conservation efforts?

Zoonotic disease transmission

And here’s one of the biology research topics that’s been on all our minds in recent years. Investigate the factors contributing to the transmission of zoonotic diseases , like COVID-19. Then posit strategies for prevention and early detection.

35) What are the ecological and genetic factors that facilitate the spillover of zoonotic pathogens from animals to humans?

36) Or how do changes in land use, deforestation, and urbanization impact the risk of zoonotic disease emergence?

37) Can early detection and surveillance systems be developed to predict and mitigate the spread of zoonotic diseases?

38) How do social and cultural factors influence human behaviors that contribute to zoonotic disease transmission?

39) And can strategies be implemented to improve global pandemic preparedness?

Bioinformatics

Are you a data fanatic? Bioinformatics involves developing computational tools and techniques to analyze and interpret large biological datasets. This enables advancements in genomics, proteomics, and systems biology. So delve into the world of bioinformatics to learn how large-scale genomic and molecular data are revolutionizing biological research.

40) How can machine learning algorithms predict the function of genes based on their DNA sequences?

41) And what computational methods can identify potential drug targets by analyzing protein-protein interactions in large biological datasets?

42) Can bioinformatics tools be used to identify potential disease-causing mutations in human genomes and guide personalized medicine approaches?

43) What are the challenges and opportunities in analyzing “omics” data (genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics) to uncover novel biological insights?

44) Or how can bioinformatics contribute to our understanding of microbial diversity, evolution, and interactions within ecosystems?

Regenerative medicine

While definitely not one of the easy biology research topics, regenerative medicine will appeal to those interested in healthcare. Research innovative approaches to stimulate tissue and organ regeneration, using stem cells, tissue engineering, and biotechnology. And while you’re at it, discover the next potential medical breakthrough.

45) How can stem cells be directed to differentiate into specific cell types for tissue regeneration, and what factors influence this process?

46) Or what are the potential applications of 3D bioprinting in creating functional tissues and organs for transplantation?

47) How can bioengineered scaffolds enhance tissue regeneration and integration with host tissues?

48) What are the ethical considerations surrounding the use of stem cells and regenerative therapies in medical treatments?

49) And can regenerative medicine approaches be used to treat neurodegenerative disorders and restore brain function?

Biology Research Topics – Final thoughts

So as you take your next steps, try not to feel overwhelmed. And instead, appreciate the vast realm of possibilities that biology research topics offer. Because the array of biology topics to research is as diverse as the ecosystems it seeks to understand. And no matter if you’re only looking for easy biology research topics, or you’re itching to unravel the mysteries of plant-microbe interactions, your exploration will continue to deepen what we know of the world around us.

High School Success

Mariya holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the Pratt Institute and is currently pursuing an MFA in writing at the University of California Davis. Mariya serves as a teaching assistant in the English department at UC Davis. She previously served as an associate editor at Carve Magazine for two years, where she managed 60 fiction writers. She is the winner of the 2015 Stony Brook Fiction Prize, and her short stories have been published in Mid-American Review , Cutbank , Sonora Review , New Orleans Review , and The Collagist , among other magazines.

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212 Unique Biology Research Topics For Students And Researchers

Every student studying something related to biology — botany, marine, animal, medicine, molecular or physical biology, is in an interesting field. It’s a subject that explores how animate and inanimate objects relate to themselves. The field unveils the past, the present, and what lies in the future of the relationship between the living and nonliving things.

This is precisely why you need custom and quality biology topics for your college and university essay or project. It’ll make it easy to brainstorm, research, and get to writing straight away. Before the deep dive, what is biology?

What Is Biology?

Everyone knows it’s the scientific study of life, but beyond that, biology facilitates the comprehension of living and nonliving things. It’s a branch that explores their anatomy, behavior, distribution, morphology, and physiology.

For example, it understands how genes are classified and constituted into generations. It encompasses various branches, including botany, medicine, genetics, ecology, marine biology, zoology, and molecular biology.

Here are what some of these mean:

Botany: This study of plants examines their structure, physiology, ecology, economic importance, and distribution, among others. It also deals with their biochemical processes, properties, and social interactions between plants. It extends to how plants are vital for human life, survival, and growth and how they play a significant role in stabilizing environmental health. Zoology: Zoology studies animal behavior, brain, structure, physiology, class, and distribution. It’s the general study of the lives of both living and extinct animals. It explains animal classification, the animal kingdom, evolution, habitat, embryology, and life span. Physiology: Physiology deals with the daily functions of the human body: How it works and the factors that make it work. It examines molecular behavior, the chemistry and physics behind locomotion, and how the cells in the living organisms’ body function. It helps understand how humans and animals get sick and what can be done to alleviate pain. Microbiology: Dealing with microorganisms, it examined how viruses, algae, fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and slime molds become parts of human life. They’re regarded as microbes, which play substantial roles in the human biochemical processes, including climate change, biodegradation, biodeterioration, food spoilage, biotech, and epidemiology. Marine Biology: This is the scientific study of organs in the sea. It understands their family classification, how they survive, and what makes wild marine animals different from domesticated and consumable ones. It also explores their interaction with the environment through several processes. The marine biologist studies marines in their natural environment, collects data on their characteristics, human impact on their living, and how they relate with themselves.

Now that you know all these, here are some custom biology topics to research for your university or college essay and paper.

Controversial Biology Topics

There are many controversial subjects in every field, and biology isn’t exempt from controversy. If you’d like to create an original essay through diverse opinions, here are biology topics for you:

What are your thoughts on the post-Roe V Wade world?
How can the post-Roe V Wade policy affect developing countries looking up to America for their laws?
Abortion and feminism: discuss
Does saving life justify cloning?
Explain the principle of abortion in medical practice
The effects of cloning in medicine
How does genetics contribute to obesity?
Explain why a parent could have Hepatitis B virus and only one of five offspring have the virus
Is homosexuality really in the gene?
How does depression correlate with genetics?
Additives and how they affect the genes
Examine how genetic mutations work
Discuss the grounds that you could prove for legalizing human cloning
Which is more immoral: Human or animal cloning?
How is nanotechnology different from biotechnology?
Discuss the manifestation of nanotechnology in science
Explain three instances where public opinion has held back scientific inventions
How does transgenic crop work?
Would you say genetically modified food is safe for consumption?
Explain why sexual abuse leads to trauma.

Biology Research Paper Topics

You’d need to write an extensive paper on biology one day. This could be when you’re in your final year in college or the university or submitting to a competition. You’d need Biology topics to research for brainstorming, and here are 30 of them:

Stem cells and tissue formation processes
Why are there different congenital disabilities?
Mixtures in anticancer drugs?
What are the complexities of existing HIV drugs?
What is the contribution of chemotherapy to cancer?
Examine the chemotherapy process and why it doesn’t work for some patients.
Explain the origin of developmental diseases
How do germs affect the cells?
What are the consequences of the sun on the white person’s and black person’s skin?
Why are some diseases treatable through drugs while some are not?
Scientific lessons learned from COVID-19 and ideas to tackle the next virus
If animals are carriers of the virus, what should be done to them?
Examine five animals in extinction and what led to it
Discuss the subject of endangered species and why people should care
Is a plant-based diet sustainable for human health?
Account for the consequence of living on Mars on human health
Discuss the inconveniences involved in space travel
How does space flight contribute to environmental disasters
Discuss the emergence of leukemia
Explain how the immune systems in humans work
Evaluate the factors that weaken the immunological system
What would you consider the deadliest virus?
Autoimmune: what is it, origin and consequences
Immune disorder: origin and how it affects the body
Does stress affect the ability to have sex?
Contribution of vaccine to eradicating disease: Discuss
What are the complexities in taking the Hepatitis B vaccine while being positive?
Allergies: why do humans have them?
DNA modification: how does it work?
Explain the misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Interesting Biology Topics

Biology doesn’t have to be boring. Different aspects of biology could be fun to explore, especially if you’ve had a flair for the study since your elementary school classes.

You can either write an essay or paper with the following interesting biology research topics:

Human emotions and conflicts with their intellectual intelligence
Emotions: Its influence on art and music and how the perception of art influences the world
The consequences of marijuana and alcohol on teenagers
Compare and contrast how alcohol affects teenagers and adults
Discuss the contributions of neuroscience to the subject of emotional pain
Explain how the brain process speech
Discuss the factors that cause autism
Explain what is meant when people say humans are animals
Why do scientists say humans are pessimists?
Factors contributing to the dopamine levels human experience
How does isolation affect the human brain?
What factors contribute to instinctive responses?
Noise pollution: how it affects living organisms
Fire ecology: The contributions of plants to fire outbreak
Explain the science behind how hot temperature, soil, and dry grass start a fire
Microbes: what do you understand by bioremediation?
Explain urban ecology and the challenges it pokes to solve
Discuss how excessive internet usage affects the human memory
Evaluate how conservation biology contributes to the extinction prevention efforts
Discuss the role of satellites and drones in understanding the natural world
Why do we need space travel and studies?
Explain the limitations of limnology studies
What are infectious-disease-causing agents all about?
Discuss what epigenetics studies encompass
Why is cancer research essential to the world?
Discuss climate change: Governments are not interested, and there is no alternative
How is behavioral science studies a core part of the understanding of the world?
Discuss the issues with genetic engineering and why it’s a challenge
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in the arguments for a plant-based diet
Create a survey amongst students of biology asking why they chose to study the course.

Biology Research Topics For College Students

If you find any of the above beyond your intellectual and Research capacity, here are some topics you can handle. You can use these for your essays, projects, quizzes, or competitions.

These custom yet popular biology research topics will examine famous personalities and other discourse in biology:

Effects of the human hormone on the mind
Why do men get erect even when they’re absentminded?
How does women’s arousal work?
How can melatonin be valuable for therapy?
Risky behavior: Hormones responsible for the risk
Stem and cloning: what is the latest research on the subject?
Hormones: changes in pregnancy
Why do pregnant women have an appetite for random and remote things?
The role of physical activities in hormone development
Examine the benefits and threats of transgenic crops
The fight against COVID-19: assess current successes
The fight against smallpox: assess current successes
The fight against HIV: history, trends, and present research
Discuss the future of prosthetic appliances
Examine the research and the future of mind-controlled limbs
What does cosmetic surgery mean, and why is it needed?
Analyze the meaning and process of vascular surgery
Discuss the debate around changes in genital organs for males and females in transgender bodies
How do donors and organ transplants work?
Account for the work of Dr. Malcom E Miller
Discuss the contribution of Charles Darwin to human evolution
Explain the trends in biomedicine
Discuss the functions of x-rays in botany
Assess the most efficient systems for wildlife preservation
Examine how poverty contributes to climate hazards
Discuss the process involved in plant metabolism
The transformation of energy into a living thing: discuss
Prevention for sexually transmitted disease: What are the misconceptions?
Analyze how the human body reacts to poison
Russian Poisoning: What are the lessons scientists must learn?
COVID-19: Discuss the efforts by two or three governments to prevent the spread
Discuss the contributions of Pfizer during the pandemic.

Marine Biology Research Topics

This subject explains orgasms in the sea, how they survive, and their interaction with their environment. If you have a flair for this field, the following Biology research topics may interest you:

Discuss what quantitative ecology through modeling means
Smallest diatoms and marine logistics: discuss
How is the shark studied?
Acidification of seas: Causes and consequences
Discuss the concept of the immortality of Jellyfishes
Discuss the differences between seawater and freshwater in marine study
Account for some of the oldest marine species
Discuss the evolution of the deep sea
Explain whales’ communication techniques
What does plankton ecology encompass?
The importance of coral reefs to seawater
Challenges that encompass geological oceanography
How tourism affects natural animal habitat
Discuss some instances of the domestication of wild marine animals
Coastal zone: pros and cons of living in such areas
How do sharks perceive enemies?
Analyze why some animals can live in water but can’t live on land
Explain how plants survive in the sea
Compare and contrast the different two species of animals in the water
How can marine energy be generated, stored, and used?

Molecular Biology Research Topics

Focusing on the construct of cells and analysis of their composition, it understands the alteration and maintenance of cellular processes. If you’d like to focus on molecular biology, here are 15 good biology research topics for you:

Ethical considerations in molecular genetics
Discuss the structure and component of the gene
Examine the restrictions in DNA
What are the peculiarities in modern nucleic acid analysis
What goes into the Pharmaceutical production of drugs
Evaluate the building blocks of life
Discuss the systems of RNA translation to protein
PCR: How DNA is tested and analyzed
Why is prion disease so dangerous?
Compare and contrast recessive genes vs. dominant genes
Can there be damage to the human DNA, and can it be repaired?
Constraints in the research of microarray data analysis
Protein purification: How it evolves
Objectives of nucleic acid
Explain the structure of a prion.

Biology Research Topics For High School

Your teachers and professors will be awed if you create impeccable essays for your next report. You need to secure the best grades as you move closer to graduation, and brainstorming any of these popular biology research topics will help:

Identify the most endangered species
The challenges to animal extinction
What are the things everyone should know about sea life?
Discuss the history of genetics
Explain the biological theory of Charles Darwin
How did the lockdown affect social interaction?
Why do some people refuse the vaccine?
Origin of genetics
What is animal hunting, and why is it fashionable
Explain the evolution of a virus
Role of lockdown in preventing deaths and illnesses
Invasive species: What does it mean?
Endangered animals: How do they survive in the face of their hazards?
Lockdown and their role in reducing coronavirus transmission
Vaccine distribution: Ideas for global distribution
Why can viruses become less virulent?
Discuss the evolution of the world
Explain the evolution of the planet
Explain what Elon Musk means when he says life on Mars is possible
What does herd immunity mean?
Flu: why is there a low incidence in 2020?
Relationship between archaeology and biology
Antiviral drug: What it means
Factors leading to the evolution of humans
Give instances of what natural selection means
What is considered the dead branches of evolution
Whale hunting: What it means and the present trends
Who is Stephen Jay, and what is his role in paleontology?
Origin of diseases: why must humans fall sick?
Why are humans called higher animals?

Human Biology Research Topics

Human biology understands humans and their relationship between themselves and their environment. It also studies how the body works and the impediments to health. Here are some easy biology research topics to explore on the subject:

How do gut bacteria affect the brain?
What are the ethical concerns around organ transplants?
The consequence of alcohol on the liver
The consequences of extreme salt on the human body
Why do humans need to deworm regularly?
The relationship between obesity and genetics
Genetically modified foods: Why are they needed?
How sun exposure affects human skin
Latest trends: Depression is hereditary
Influence of music on the human brain
What are the stages of lung cancer
Forensic DNA: latest trends
How visual consumptions affect how humans think
What is the process that leads to pregnancy?
Explain the role of nanotechnology in HIV research
Discuss any experiment with stem cells you know about
Explain how humans consume food
Discuss the process of metabolism as well as its criticality to human health
Explore the consistent challenges technology poses to human health
Explain the process of body decay to a skeleton.

Cell Biology Research Topics

There are many evolutionary biology research paper topics formed not by the nomenclature but for what they stand for. Cell biology is one of the most complex branches of the field.

It examines minor units and the living organisms that make them up. The focus is on the relationship between the cytoplasm, membrane, and parts of the cell. Here are some topics to explore for your scientific dissertation writing :

How does chromatin engage in the alterations of gene expression?
What are the usual cell infections, and why does the body have immunity defections?
Identify and account for the heritage of Robert Brown in his core career focus
Explain the structure of the animal cell and why It’s what it is
Identify the cells in the human body as well as their functions
Explain a scenario and justify the context of animals photosynthesizing like plants
Why do bacteria invade the body, and how do they do it?
Why are mitochondria considered the powerhouse of the cell
Use the molecular analysis tool to explain multicellular organisms
Examine how the White blood cells fight disease
What do you understand about the role of cell biology in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease
What are the latest research methods in cell biology?
Identify the characteristics of viruses and why they threaten human existence.
Discuss the differences between DNA and RNA
What part of the body is responsible for human functionality for as long as the individual wants?

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Diverse Biology Research Paper Topics for Students: A Comprehensive List

By: Barbara P.

25 min read

Reviewed By: Cathy A.

Published on: Mar 26, 2024

Sometimes, picking a cool biology topic for a research paper can be tricky for researchers. There are so many options, and it's not easy to know which one is just right.

It can feel overwhelming because there's a ton of biology stuff out there.

You might be unsure about which topic will impress your teacher and make your research paper stand out. It's normal to feel a bit stressed about choosing the perfect topic.

But don't worry! This blog is here to help.

We'll guide you by sharing the latest and most exciting topics and ideas for a biology research paper. We'll help you find a topic that interests you and will make your research paper stand out.

Let's get started!

On this Page

Biology Research Paper Topics for Students

Choosing the right topic for a biology research paper is very important, and we're here to help you out. In this section, we'll provide you with a list of biology research paper ideas made just for researchers like you.

9th Grade Biology Research Paper Topics

Cell Structure and Function: Exploring the Basics of Cells and Their Organelles
Photosynthesis: Understanding How Plants Convert Sunlight into Energy
DNA and Genetic Research: Mendelian Inheritance and Punnett Squares
Human Anatomy: Investigating the Skeletal, Muscular, and Nervous Systems
Microorganisms and Disease: Examining Bacteria, Viruses, and Fungi
Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Roles of Plants and Animals in their Environments
Evolutionary Concepts: Natural Selection and Adaptations
Environmental Issues: Pollution, Climate Change, and Conservation
Biotechnology Basics: Genetic Engineering and Its Applications
Human Reproduction: Male and Female Reproductive Systems

Easy Biology Research Topics for High School Students

The Impact of Climate Change on Local Ecosystems
Genetic Disorders and Their Inheritance Patterns
The Role of Microorganisms in Food Spoilage
The Effects of Different Diets on Human Gut Microbiota
Biodiversity Conservation in Urban Environments
Investigating the Science Behind Vaccines and Immunization
Human Evolution and Its Influences on Modern Society
The Relationship Between Exercise and Cognitive Function
Plant Cell Adaptations to Arid Environments
The Influence of Pollution on Aquatic Ecosystems

Interesting Biology Research Topics For Grade 12

Gene Editing Technologies: CRISPR-Cas9 and its Applications
The Human Microbiome: Impacts on Health and Disease
Mendelian Genetics: Inheritance Patterns and Genetic Disorders
Evolutionary Biology: Mechanisms of Natural Selection
Neurobiology: Understanding Brain Function and Neural Pathways
Environmental Impact on Gene Expression: Epigenetics
Cell Signaling Pathways: Communication within Cells
Biotechnology in Medicine: Applications and Future Prospects
Ecological Succession: Changes in Ecosystems Over Time
The Carbon Cycle: Importance in Climate Regulation

Good Biology Research Topics for College Students

Evolutionary Psychology: Understanding Human Behavior through Evolution
Precision Medicine: Tailoring Treatments Based on Genetic Makeup
Immunotherapy in Cancer Treatment: Harnessing the Immune System
Ecological Impact of Invasive Species on Local Ecosystems
Bioinformatics and Big Data in Genomics Research
Regenerative Medicine: Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering
Climate Change and its Effects on Marine Biology
The Microbiome-Gut-Brain Axis: Linking Gut Health to Mental Health
CRISPR-Cas9 and Gene Editing: Promises and Challenges
Proteomics: Analyzing the Functions and Interactions of Proteins

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Human Biology Research Topics

Epigenetics and Human Health: Environmental Influences on Gene Expression
Human Evolution: Genetic and Anthropological Perspectives
Reproductive Biology: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Reproductive Disorders
Cardiovascular Health: Physiology, Diseases, and Treatment Strategies
Metabolic Syndrome: Links Between Obesity, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Diseases
Aging and Age-Related Diseases: Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms
Stem Cell Therapies: Applications in Regenerative Medicine
Neurodegenerative Diseases: Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's
Nutrigenomics: Interactions Between Diet, Genes, and Health
Personalized Medicine: Genomic Approaches to Tailored Healthcare

Basic Principles of Cloning Research Paper Topics

Epigenetic Aspects of Cloned Organisms
Cloning and Genetic Diversity: Implications for Species Conservation
Stem Cell Cloning: Potential for Regenerative Medicine
Comparative Analysis of Cloning Methods in Different Species
Cloning and Reproductive Technologies: Fertility Treatments and Beyond
Cloning in Biomedical Research: Models and Contributions
Cloning and the Future of Organ Transplants
Environmental Impact of Cloning: Ecological Considerations
Cloning and Genetic Engineering in Pharmaceuticals
Cloning and the Quest for Extinct Species Revival

Climate Change Research Paper Topics

The Role of Human Activities in Climate Change
Impact of Climate Change on Global Weather Patterns
Rising Sea Levels: Causes and Consequences
Climate Change and its Effects on Biodiversity
The Relationship Between Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Global Warming
Mitigation Strategies for Reducing Carbon Footprints
The Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture and Food Security
Extreme Weather Events and their Connection to Climate Change
Polar Ice Melting: Consequences for Ecosystems and Sea Levels
Climate Change and its Influence on Ocean Circulation

CRISPR and Genetic Engineering Research Paper Topics

Off-Target Effects in CRISPR-Cas Editing: Challenges and Solutions
CRISPR in Gene Therapy: Advancements and Limitations
CRISPR and Synthetic Biology: Engineering Biological Systems
CRISPR-Cas Systems in Microbial Biotechnology
Regulatory Frameworks for CRISPR Applications in Different Countries
CRISPR and Epigenome Editing: Modifying Gene Expression
CRISPR and Functional Genomics: Unraveling Gene Functions
Precision Medicine: Personalized Therapies Enabled by CRISPR
CRISPR and Disease Resistance in Plants and Animals
CRISPR-Cas Systems in Prokaryotes: Diversity and Evolutionary Insights

Current Oxytocin Science Research Paper Topics

Oxytocin's Influence on Empathy and Emotional Processing
Oxytocin and Autism Spectrum Disorders: Current Research Findings
The Neurobiology of Oxytocin: Receptors, Signaling Pathways, and Modulation
Oxytocin as a Potential Treatment for Mental Health Disorders
Oxytocin and Bonding in Animal Models: Comparative Studies
Oxytocin and Pain Perception: Mechanisms and Clinical Applications
Oxytocin in the Context of Social Decision-Making and Trust Games
Oxytocin and Cardiovascular Health: Exploring the Connection
The Gut-Brain Axis: Oxytocin's Role in Intestinal Functions and Health
Oxytocin and Aging: Implications for Cognitive Function and Well-being

Does Vaccination Have Benefits? Research Paper Topics

Economic Impact of Vaccination on Healthcare Systems
Vaccination and Global Health Equity: Challenges and Opportunities
Emerging and Re-emerging Diseases: The Role of Vaccination in Prevention
Vaccination in the Era of COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Future Strategies
Vaccine Hesitancy: Identifying Factors and Developing Effective Communication Strategies
The Role of Vaccination in Maternal and Child Health
Vaccination and Antibiotic Resistance: A Holistic Approach to Disease Prevention
Immunization in High-Risk Populations: Tailoring Strategies for Vulnerable Communities
Vaccine Diplomacy: International Collaboration in Disease Prevention
Advances in Vaccine Technology: RNA Vaccines and Beyond

Endangered Species Recovery Research Paper Topics

Human-Wildlife Conflict Resolution: Enhancing Coexistence for Endangered Species
Conservation Policies and Legislation: Assessing Effectiveness in Species Recovery
Technology in Conservation: Drones, Satellites, and their Applications for Endangered Species Monitoring
Community Engagement in Conservation: Building Support for Endangered Species Recovery
Ecotourism and Conservation: Balancing Economic Interests with Wildlife Protection
Assessing the Effectiveness of Protected Areas in Endangered Species Recovery
Behavioral Ecology of Endangered Species: Understanding Patterns for Conservation
Disease Management in Endangered Species: Risks and Strategies
The Role of Citizen Science in Monitoring and Protecting Endangered Species
Cross-Border Collaboration in Endangered Species Recovery: Challenges and Opportunities

Hormonal Control of Reproductive System Research Paper Topics

Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH): Central Regulator of Reproductive Hormones
Follicle-Stimulating Hormone (FSH) and Luteinizing Hormone (LH): Their Roles in Ovarian and Testicular Function
Estrogen and Progesterone: Hormonal Regulation of the Female Reproductive System
Testosterone: Key Player in Male Reproductive Physiology
Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Gonadal Axis: Coordinated Control of Reproductive Hormones
Hormonal Changes during the Menstrual Cycle: Implications for Fertility
Thyroid Hormones and Reproduction: Interactions and Impact
Prolactin: Role in Reproduction and Lactation
Kisspeptin: Emerging Regulator of Reproductive Hormones
Hormonal Control of Spermatogenesis: Insights into Male Fertility

Research Paper Topics About Human Hormones

Insulin and Glucagon: Hormonal Control of Blood Sugar Levels
Hormones and Sleep: Understanding the Circadian Rhythms
Reproductive Hormones in Men and Women: Beyond Fertility
Hormonal Influences on Mood and Behavior: Neuroendocrinology
Oxytocin: The "Love Hormone" and Social Bonding
Hormonal Regulation of Bone Health: Osteoporosis and Beyond
Hormones and Cardiovascular Health: Implications for Heart Disease
Melatonin: Circadian Rhythms and Sleep-Wake Cycles
Endocrine Disruptors: Environmental Impact on Hormonal Balance
Hormones and the Immune System: Interactions and Immunomodulation

Research Paper Topics About Immune System

Immunotherapy in Cancer Treatment: Current Advances and Future Directions
Autoimmune Diseases: Unraveling Mechanisms and Therapeutic Strategies
Role of Gut Microbiota in Immune System Regulation
Vaccines and Immunization: Advancements and Global Health Impacts
Innate Immune System: Key Players and Responses to Pathogens
Adaptive Immune System: Understanding Antigen Recognition and Memory
Immunodeficiency Disorders: Causes, Diagnosis, and Treatment
Inflammatory Responses in Autoimmune Diseases: Targeting Therapeutic Interventions
Cross-Talk Between the Immune System and the Nervous System
Immunosenescence: Aging and Changes in Immune Function

Research Paper Topics About Animal Habitats Conservation

Conservation of Migratory Species: Challenges and International Collaboration
Protected Areas and Their Role in Preserving Animal Habitats
Human-Wildlife Conflict: Balancing Conservation and Human Needs
Climate Change and Animal Habitats: Adaptive Management Strategies
Conservation of Endangered Ecosystems: Lessons from Success Stories
Wetland Conservation: Importance for Waterfowl and Biodiversity
The Role of Connectivity in Habitat Conservation: Corridors and Networks
Conservation of Grasslands and Savannas: Sustaining Open Habitats
Alpine Ecosystem Conservation: Challenges at High Altitudes
Tropical Rainforest Conservation: Addressing Deforestation and Biodiversity Loss

Research Paper Topics About Biology Behind The Bipolar Disorder

Inflammatory Markers and Immune Dysregulation in Bipolar Disorder
Neuroplasticity and Bipolar Disorder: Implications for Treatment
Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Bipolar Disorder: Energy Metabolism Perspectives
Neuroendocrine Aberrations in Bipolar Disorder: Cortisol and Stress Response
Sleep Disturbances and Circadian Disruptions in Bipolar Disorder
Oxidative Stress and Antioxidant Defense in Bipolar Disorder
Hormonal Influences on Bipolar Disorder: Estrogen and Testosterone
Gut-Brain Axis and Bipolar Disorder: Role of the Microbiome
Pharmacogenomics of Bipolar Medications: Personalized Approaches
Animal Models in Bipolar Disorder Research: Bridging the Biological Gap

Research Paper Topics About Can Abortion Be Safe?

Comparative Analysis of Abortion Safety: Surgical vs. Medical Methods
Access to Safe Abortion Services: Global Disparities and Challenges
Impact of Legal Restrictions on Abortion Safety: A Public Health Perspective
Telemedicine and Abortion: Safety, Accessibility, and Regulatory Considerations
Psychological Well-being After Abortion: Longitudinal Studies and Meta-Analyses
Quality of Care in Abortion Services: Patient Experiences and Healthcare Provider Perspectives
Innovations in Abortion Techniques: Advancing Safety and Efficacy
Post-Abortion Care: Addressing Complications and Ensuring Patient Support
Public Health Interventions to Improve Abortion Safety: Lessons from Successful Programs
Abortion in Humanitarian Crises: Ensuring Safe Services in Challenging Environments

Cell Biology Research Topics

Cellular Senescence: Aging at the Cellular Level
Cytoskeleton Dynamics: Microtubules, Microfilaments, and Intermediate Filaments
Apoptosis and Programmed Cell Death: Molecular Mechanisms
Cellular Reprogramming and Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells
Human DNA Replication and Repair Mechanisms in Cell Biology
Cell Adhesion Molecules: Functions in Development and Disease
Ion Channels and Membrane Transport in Cell Physiology
Stem Cell Niche: Microenvironment Regulation and Stem Cell Fate
Cell Differentiation: Molecular Signals and Transcriptional Control
Organelle Biogenesis and Dynamics in Cellular Function

Marine Biology Research Paper Topics

Coral Reef Ecology: Threats, Conservation, and Restoration
Marine Biodiversity: Assessing Patterns and Drivers
Ocean Acidification: Impacts on Marine Life and Ecosystems
Deep-Sea Bioluminescence: Adaptations and Ecological Significance
Marine Mammal Communication: Vocalizations and Social Behaviors
Plastic Pollution in Oceans: Effects on Marine Life and Mitigation Strategies
Marine Microorganisms: Roles in Biogeochemical Cycling and Climate Regulation
Fisheries Management: Sustainable Practices and Overfishing Concerns
Marine Protected Areas: Effectiveness and Challenges in Conservation
Seagrass Ecology: Importance in Coastal Ecosystems and Restoration Efforts

Research Paper Topics for Environmental Psychology

Impact of Urban Design on Human Well-being: A Psychological Perspective
Nature-Based Therapies: The Psychological Benefits of Green Spaces
Environmental Stressors in Urban Environments: Coping Mechanisms and Interventions
Psychological Effects of Climate Change: Understanding and Mitigating Anxiety
Pro-environmental Behavior: Factors Influencing Sustainable Practices
Restorative Environments: Exploring the Role of Nature in Stress Recovery
The Influence of Environmental Aesthetics on Emotional Well-being
Connection to Nature and its Relationship to Mental Health
Environmental Justice: Psychosocial Impacts of Unequal Environmental Exposures
Place Attachment and Identity: How People Form Bonds with their Environment

Evolutionary Biology Research Paper Topics

Evolutionary Medicine: Understanding Human Health in an Evolutionary Context
Evolutionary Psychology: Behavioral Adaptations and Human Evolution
Evolutionary Conservation Biology: Balancing Conservation and Evolutionary Processes
Evolutionary Genetics: Genetic Variation, Selection, and Adaptation
Paleontology and Evolution: Fossil Record and Insights into Ancient Life Forms
Evolution of Social Behavior: Cooperation, Altruism, and Kin Selection
Evolutionary Insights into Aging and Senescence
Evolution of Sex: Theories and Mechanisms
Phylogeography: Evolutionary History and Geographic Distribution of Species
Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Origins and Migration Patterns

Research Paper Topics About How Addictive Substances Affect Our Genes?

Epigenetic Modifications Induced by Substance Abuse: Unraveling the Molecular Mechanisms
Impact of Addictive Substances on DNA Methylation Patterns
Genetic Vulnerability to Substance Addiction: Identifying Risk Factors
Neurotransmitter Receptor Gene Expression and Substance Dependence
Epigenetic Changes in Offspring Due to Parental Substance Use
Substance Abuse and DNA Repair Mechanisms: Implications for Genomic Stability
Epigenetic Regulation of Reward Pathways in the Brain: Role in Addiction
Long-Term Effects of Addictive Substances on Gene Expression
Pharmacogenomics of Addiction Treatment: Personalized Approaches
Epigenetic Biomarkers of Substance Addiction: Diagnostic and Therapeutic Potential

Human Cloning Biology Topics

Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) in Human Cloning: Techniques and Applications
Ethics of Human Cloning: Considerations and Controversies
Genetic and Epigenetic Consequences of Cloning: Insights from Animal Models
Cloning for Reproductive Purposes: Challenges and Ethical Implications
Therapeutic Cloning: Potential Applications in Regenerative Medicine
Legal Frameworks and Regulations Surrounding Human Cloning
Mitochondrial Replacement Techniques: Addressing Genetic Disorders through Cloning
Cloning and Genetic Diversity: Evaluating the Impact on Population Genetics
Cloned Organisms and Aging: Exploring Telomere Dynamics and Longevity
Challenges in Cloning Human Organs for Transplantation

Research Paper Topics on Immune System And Stress

Stress and the Immune System: Interactions and Bidirectional Influences
Psychoneuroimmunology: Understanding the Connection between Stress, Brain, and Immunity
Chronic Stress and Inflammation: Implications for Health and Disease
Acute Stress Responses and Their Immediate Impact on Immune Function
Stress-Induced Changes in Immune Cell Distribution and Activity
Neuroendocrine Regulation of Immune Responses during Stress
Stress and Autoimmune Diseases: Unraveling the Complex Relationship
Impact of Early Life Stress on Immune System Development
Coping Mechanisms and Stress Reduction Interventions: Effects on Immune Function
Psychological Stress and Susceptibility to Viral Infections

Research Paper Topics for Infectious Diseases

Epidemiology of Respiratory Viruses: Influenza, COVID-19, and Beyond
Bacterial Pathogenesis: Mechanisms of Infection and Host Responses
Waterborne Diseases: Contaminated Water Sources and Public Health Risks
Neglected Tropical Diseases: Challenges in Diagnosis, Treatment, and Eradication
Fungal Infections: Rising Incidence and Novel Therapeutic Approaches
Surveillance and Control of Nosocomial Infections in Healthcare Settings
Viral Hepatitis: Global Burden, Prevention, and Treatment Strategies
Tuberculosis: Advances in Diagnosis, Treatment, and Drug Development
Helminthic Infections: Parasitic Worms and their Impact on Human Health
Epidemiology of Sexually Transmitted Infections: Trends and Challenges

Research Paper Topics for Molecular Biology

Protein Folding and Misfolding: Implications in Diseases
DNA Repair Mechanisms: Maintaining Genomic Integrity
Molecular Basis of Cancer: Oncogenes, Tumor Suppressors, and Signaling Pathways
Telomeres and Telomerase: Maintaining Chromosomal Integrity
Synthetic Biology: Engineering Biological Systems for Practical Applications
Molecular Mechanisms of Apoptosis: Programmed Cell Death
Signal Transduction Pathways: Molecular Communication within Cells
Molecular Biology of Aging: Understanding the Cellular Aging Process
Gene Expression Profiling: Techniques and Applications in Molecular Biology
Structural Biology: Revealing the Three-Dimensional Architecture of Biomolecules

Research Paper Topics for Organ Transplantation

Immune Responses to Transplanted Organs: Mechanisms and Alloreactivity
Organ Preservation Techniques: Advances and Challenges in Transplantation
Organ Transplantation and Xenotransplantation: Current Status and Future Prospects
Donor-Recipient Matching in Organ Transplantation: Immunological Considerations
Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury in Transplanted Organs: Molecular Mechanisms and Prevention
Organ Allocation and Distribution: Ethical Dilemmas and Policy Considerations
Regenerative Medicine Approaches in Organ Transplantation: Tissue Engineering and Stem Cells
Living Organ Donation: Medical, Ethical, and Psychosocial Implications
Immunomodulatory Therapies in Organ Transplantation: Impact on Graft Survival
Biomarkers in Transplantation: Monitoring and Predicting Allograft Function

Research Paper Topics for Plant Pathology

Fungal Plant Pathogens: Identification, Classification, and Control
Bacterial Plant Pathogens: Mechanisms of Infection and Disease Management
Viral Diseases in Plants: Molecular Biology and Strategies for Control
Plant Immunity and Defense Mechanisms Against Pathogens
Phytophthora infestans and Late Blight: History, Impact, and Management
Epidemiology of Plant Diseases: Understanding Spread and Impact
Host-Pathogen Interactions: Molecular Dialogue in Plant-Pathogen Relationships
Integrated Pest Management in Agriculture: Strategies for Sustainable Disease Control
Genomic Approaches in Plant Pathology: Unraveling the Molecular Basis of Resistance
Emerging Plant Diseases: Identification, Characterization, and Preparedness

Plant Biology Research Topics

Photosynthesis: Understanding Mechanisms and Enhancing Efficiency
Plant Hormones: Roles in Growth, Development, and Response to Stress
Disease Resistance in Plants: Molecular Mechanisms and Genetic Engineering
Plant-Microbe Interactions: Symbiosis and Pathogenesis
Seed Germination: Environmental Cues and Molecular Regulation
Genetic Diversity in Crop Plants: Conservation and Utilization
Climate Change and Plant Adaptations: Implications for Agriculture
Phytoremediation: Plants as Tools for Environmental Cleanup
Plant Epigenetics: Epigenetic Modifications and Gene Regulation
Plant Physiology Under Abiotic Stress: Drought, Salinity, and Temperature

Research Paper Topics for Prions

Prion Diseases: Overview, Classification, and Epidemiology
Prion Protein Structure: Insights into Misfolding and Aggregation
Cellular Prion Protein (PrPC) Function and Implications in Health
Prion Strains: Diversity, Characteristics, and Disease Variability
Prion Transmission: Routes, Mechanisms, and Zoonotic Potential
Neurodegenerative Effects of Prions: Impact on Brain Function
Prion Diseases in Humans: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and Variant CJD
Prion Diseases in Animals: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Scrapie
Prion Detection Methods: Advances and Challenges in Diagnosis
Prion Strain Adaptation and Evolution: Molecular Mechanisms

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Research Paper Topics for Social Behavior in Animals

Altruism in Social Animals: Evolutionary Explanations and Adaptive Benefits
Communication Strategies in Social Insects: Chemical, Visual, and Acoustic Signals
Dominance Hierarchies in Animal Societies: Mechanisms and Functions
Social Learning in Animals: Observational Learning and Cultural Transmission
Mate Choice and Sexual Selection: Social Dynamics in Animal Courtship
Cooperative Breeding in Social Birds and Mammals: Mechanisms and Benefits
Agonistic Behavior in Social Groups: Conflict Resolution and Communication
Parental Care in Social Animals: Roles, Strategies, and Cooperation
Territoriality in Animal Societies: Defense and Resource Management
Group Dynamics in Primates: Social Structure and Hierarchy

Research Paper Topics for Stem Cells

Pluripotent Stem Cells: Induction, Differentiation, and Applications
Adult Stem Cells: Niches, Identification, and Regenerative Potential
Hematopoietic Stem Cells: Biology and Clinical Applications in Blood Disorders
Mesenchymal Stem Cells: Therapeutic Potential in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs): Reprogramming and Applications
Neural Stem Cells: Development, Function, and Neuroregeneration
Cancer Stem Cells: Origin, Identification, and Targeted Therapies
Stem Cell-Based Therapies for Cardiovascular Regeneration
Ethical Considerations in Stem Cell Research: Cloning, Genome Editing, and Beyond
Stem Cells in Ophthalmology: Vision Restoration and Retinal Diseases

Biological Psychology Research Paper Topics

Neurotransmitters and Behavior: Examining the Role of Dopamine, Serotonin, and Acetylcholine
Neuroplasticity: Implications for Learning, Memory, and Brain Rehabilitation
Brain Imaging Techniques: Advances in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Neuroimaging
Hormones and Behavior: Exploring the Influence of Endocrine System on Psychological Processes
Genetics and Mental Health: Investigating the Role of Genetic Factors in Psychiatric Disorders
Neurobiology of Stress: Impact on Cognitive Function and Emotional Well-being
Sleep and Brain Function: Understanding the Relationship between Sleep and Mental Health
Neurological Basis of Addiction: Mechanisms of Substance Abuse and Dependence
Neurodevelopmental Disorders: Exploring the Brain Basis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
Emotion and the Brain: Neural Substrates of Emotional Processing

Controversial Biology Topics Research Paper

Genetic Engineering and Designer Babies: Ethical Considerations
Cloning of Animals and Humans: Scientific Advancements and Moral Dilemmas
Gene Editing Technologies (e.g., CRISPR): Potential and Ethical Concerns
Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Moral and Religious Perspectives
Human Enhancement Technologies: Biological and Ethical Implications
Vaccination Controversies: Public Health, Safety, and Individual Rights
Evolution vs. Creationism: Teaching Perspectives in Schools
Animal Testing: Ethical Considerations in Scientific Research
Endangered Species Conservation: Balancing Preservation and Human Needs
Climate Change Skepticism: Scientific Consensus and Public Perception

How to Choose a Biology Research Topic?

Choosing a research paper topic can be an exciting but challenging task. Here's a guide on how to choose biology research topics:

Identify Your Interests: Consider what aspects of biology interest you the most.

Whether it's genetics, ecology, physiology, or any specific field, choosing a topic aligned with your interests makes the research process more engaging.

Explore Current Trends: Stay updated on current trends and breakthroughs in biology.

Investigate recent publications, journals, and news to find emerging topics that pique your curiosity.

Consider the Scope: Determine the scope of your research.

Choose a topic that is neither too broad nor too narrow. It should be specific enough to explore in-depth but broad enough to find relevant literature and resources.

Consult with Mentors or Instructors: Seek advice from mentors, instructors, or research advisors.

They can provide insights into feasible and interesting research areas, as well as guidance on available resources.

Think About Real-World Applications: Explore topics with real-world applications.

Consider how the research can contribute to solving practical problems or advancing technologies.

Consider Ethical Implications: Be mindful of ethical considerations.

Ensure that your research topic aligns with ethical standards and guidelines in the field of biology.

In conclusion, choosing a biology research topic is a crucial step in your academic journey. A well-chosen topic not only contributes to scientific knowledge but also enhances your understanding of biology.

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Barbara has a Ph.D. in public health from an Ivy League university and extensive experience working in the medical field. With her practical experience conducting research on various health issues, she is skilled in writing innovative papers on healthcare. Her many works have been published in multiple publications.

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Home » 350+ Biology Research Topics

350+ Biology Research Topics

Biology is a vast field of study that explores the diverse aspects of life, from the smallest organisms to the complex ecosystems they inhabit. With new discoveries being made every day, the field of biology is constantly evolving and expanding. As a result, there are numerous research topics within biology that can capture the imagination of students, researchers , and professionals alike. Whether you’re interested in genetics, ecology, microbiology, or any other subfield of biology, there is no shortage of fascinating topics to explore. In this post, we will discuss some of the most compelling biology research topics that you can delve into.

Biology Research Topics

Biology Research Topics are as follows:

The role of gut microbiota in human health and disease.
The effects of climate change on animal behavior and physiology.
The molecular mechanisms of cancer development and progression.
The evolutionary origins of human language.
The impact of pesticides on insect populations and ecosystems.
The genetic basis of aging and longevity.
The ecological importance of microbial communities in soil.
The physiology and behavior of marine mammals.
The molecular mechanisms of viral infections.
The evolutionary history of flowering plants.
The ecological impacts of invasive species.
The role of epigenetics in gene regulation and disease.
The evolution of social behavior in animals.
The physiology and ecology of birdsong.
The impact of antibiotics on gut microbiota and human health.
The role of the microbiome in psychiatric disorders.
The evolutionary history of human migrations.
The ecological and physiological effects of light pollution on animals.
The mechanisms of cell division and differentiation.
The ecological impacts of deforestation.
The molecular mechanisms of drug addiction.
The genetic basis of plant resistance to pests and diseases.
The evolutionary history of human diet and nutrition.
The molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases.
The ecology and evolution of sexual selection.
The physiological and behavioral effects of air pollution on animals.
The role of epigenetics in plant development and stress response.
The evolutionary history of animal domestication.
The molecular mechanisms of genetic diseases.
The ecological impacts of climate change on plants.
The evolutionary history of human mating systems.
The physiological and behavioral effects of noise pollution on animals.
The genetic basis of intelligence and cognitive abilities.
The ecological and physiological effects of ocean acidification on marine organisms.
The molecular mechanisms of immune system function and dysfunction.
The evolutionary history of human social structures.
The ecological impacts of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems.
The genetic basis of animal migration.
The physiological and behavioral effects of light and dark cycles on animals.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of symbiosis.
The molecular mechanisms of gene regulation and expression.
The evolutionary history of human disease resistance.
The ecological impacts of overfishing on marine ecosystems.
The genetic basis of animal communication.
The physiological and behavioral effects of temperature changes on animals.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of parasitism.
The molecular mechanisms of circadian rhythms.
The evolutionary history of human social cognition.
The ecological impacts of urbanization on wildlife.
The genetic basis of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
The impact of climate change on insect population dynamics.
The role of the microbiome in the development of autoimmune diseases.
The genetic basis of complex human diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
The evolution of plant secondary metabolites and their ecological functions.
The effects of anthropogenic noise on animal communication and behavior.
The molecular mechanisms of protein synthesis and folding.
The role of RNA in gene expression and regulation.
The ecology and evolution of microbial symbioses in plants.
The physiological and behavioral effects of air temperature changes on animals.
The genetic basis of crop domestication and improvement.
The evolution of reproductive strategies in animals.
The impacts of plastic pollution on terrestrial ecosystems.
The molecular mechanisms of stem cell differentiation and regeneration.
The ecological dynamics of predator-prey interactions.
The role of gut microbiota in the regulation of host metabolism.
The genetic basis of host-pathogen coevolution.
The evolution of social cognition and cooperation in animals.
The ecological and physiological effects of wildfires on ecosystems.
The molecular mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in eukaryotic cells.
The role of microorganisms in soil nutrient cycling and ecosystem functioning.
The genetic basis of plant-pathogen interactions.
The ecology and evolution of microbial communities in the ocean.
The physiological and behavioral effects of water pollution on aquatic organisms.
The molecular mechanisms of protein degradation and turnover.
The impact of urbanization on pollinator populations and plant-pollinator interactions.
The genetic basis of insecticide resistance in pests.
The evolution of animal cognition and perception.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of host-parasite interactions.
The role of epigenetic modifications in plant adaptation to environmental stress.
The physiological and behavioral effects of endocrine disruptors on animals.
The molecular mechanisms of DNA replication and repair.
The impact of ocean warming on coral reef ecosystems.
The genetic basis of animal personality traits.
The ecology and evolution of microbial symbioses in animals.
The physiological and behavioral effects of light quality on plants.
The molecular mechanisms of RNA editing and splicing.
The role of microbial communities in plant-pathogen interactions.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of seed dispersal.
The genetic basis of animal coloration and pattern.
The impact of climate change on plant phenology and productivity.
The molecular mechanisms of signal transduction in cells.
The role of microbial communities in the human gut-brain axis.
The ecology and evolution of animal migrations.
The physiological and behavioral effects of chemical pollution on animals.
The genetic basis of animal development and morphogenesis.
The evolution of animal social behavior and communication.
The ecological dynamics of plant-pollinator networks.
The molecular mechanisms of intracellular trafficking and transport.
The role of microbial communities in the degradation of pollutants.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of species interactions in ecological communities.
The role of epigenetics in cancer development and progression.
The molecular basis of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
The impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
The genetic basis of aging and age-related diseases.
The evolution of social organization in primates.
The ecological dynamics of plant-fungal interactions.
The role of microbiota in immune system development and function.
The molecular mechanisms of DNA damage and repair.
The physiological and behavioral effects of climate change on marine organisms.
The genetic basis of human variation and diversity.
The evolution of sexual selection and mate choice in animals.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of species invasions.
The role of microbiota in brain function and behavior.
The molecular mechanisms of immune system activation and regulation.
The physiological and behavioral effects of pollution on wildlife.
The genetic basis of behavioral disorders and mental illness.
The evolution of plant-pollinator mutualisms.
The ecological dynamics of predator-prey coevolution.
The role of microbiota in metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes.
The molecular mechanisms of protein-protein interactions and signaling.
The genetic basis of complex traits such as intelligence and personality.
The evolution of animal communication and language.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of mutualistic interactions in ecological communities.
The role of microbiota in the development and maintenance of gut homeostasis.
The molecular mechanisms of neurotransmitter synthesis and release.
The physiological and behavioral effects of artificial light at night on wildlife.
The genetic basis of developmental disorders such as autism and ADHD.
The evolution of host-parasite coevolution and adaptation.
The ecological dynamics of plant-herbivore interactions.
The role of microbiota in the regulation of metabolism and energy balance.
The molecular mechanisms of membrane transport and signaling.
The physiological and behavioral effects of habitat fragmentation on wildlife.
The genetic basis of circadian rhythms and sleep disorders.
The evolution of animal cognition and decision-making.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of trophic cascades.
The role of microbiota in the development and function of the respiratory system.
The molecular mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance.
The physiological and behavioral effects of endocrine disruptors on wildlife.
The genetic basis of developmental plasticity and adaptation.
The evolution of animal social learning and culture.
The ecological dynamics of predator-prey interactions in aquatic systems.
The role of microbiota in the regulation of host immunity and inflammation.
The molecular mechanisms of RNA interference and gene silencing.
The physiological and behavioral effects of climate change on migratory animals.
The genetic basis of drug addiction and substance abuse disorders.
The evolution of animal cooperation and conflict resolution.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of niche construction.
The role of microbiota in the regulation of host-microbe interactions.
The molecular mechanisms of gene regulation by non-coding RNAs.
The role of epigenetics in gene expression and regulation.
The molecular mechanisms of DNA damage response and repair.
The impact of environmental toxins on human health.
The evolutionary origins of viruses and their impact on hosts.
The genetics of aging and age-related diseases.
The impact of ocean acidification on marine organisms.
The molecular basis of cancer development and progression.
The genetic basis of behavior in animals.
The impact of environmental stressors on plant growth and productivity.
The evolution of sex determination and sexual selection.
The role of the immune system in host-microbe interactions.
The molecular mechanisms of circadian rhythms and sleep.
The impact of air pollution on respiratory health.
The genetic basis of speciation and hybridization.
The role of neurotransmitters in brain function and behavior.
The ecological dynamics of microbial communities in soil.
The impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
The molecular mechanisms of viral entry, replication, and release.
The genetics of plant domestication and diversification.
The role of mitochondrial DNA in aging and disease.
The impact of deforestation on ecosystem functioning.
The molecular basis of drug addiction and treatment.
The genetic basis of adaptation and evolution in response to environmental change.
The role of gut-brain signaling in behavior and disease.
The impact of noise pollution on wildlife populations.
The genetic basis of plant morphology and development.
The role of the microbiome in disease susceptibility and resistance.
The ecological dynamics of plant-insect interactions.
The impact of agricultural practices on soil health and biodiversity.
The molecular mechanisms of gene regulation in development and disease.
The genetic basis of complex traits in humans and animals.
The role of cytokines in immune response and inflammation.
The ecological dynamics of microbial communities in aquatic ecosystems.
The impact of plastic waste on marine ecosystems.
The molecular mechanisms of genome stability and repair.
The genetics of rare and common genetic diseases.
The role of the endocannabinoid system in health and disease.
The ecological dynamics of competition and cooperation in populations.
The impact of light pollution on wildlife behavior and ecology.
The genetic basis of animal migration and navigation.
The role of the microbiome in host metabolism and energy balance.
The impact of climate change on agricultural productivity and food security.
The molecular mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance and transmission.
The genetics of human brain development and disorders.
The role of pheromones in animal communication and behavior.
The ecological dynamics of host-microbe-pathogen interactions.
The effect of diet and nutrition on gut microbiome diversity and composition.
The ecology and evolution of microbial interactions in the soil.
The role of epigenetic modifications in cancer development and progression.
The impact of climate change on marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
The molecular mechanisms of mitochondrial respiration and ATP synthesis.
The role of non-coding RNAs in gene regulation and disease.
The evolution and diversification of flowering plants.
The effects of artificial light at night on animal behavior and physiology.
The genetic basis of adaptation to extreme environments.
The ecology and evolution of plant-microbe interactions.
The physiological and behavioral effects of noise pollution on wildlife.
The molecular mechanisms of DNA methylation and histone modification.
The role of microbial communities in the cycling of nutrients in aquatic ecosystems.
The evolution of animal color vision and perception.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of mutualistic interactions.
The impact of deforestation on soil fertility and carbon storage.
The molecular mechanisms of viral replication and pathogenesis.
The role of microorganisms in the biodegradation of plastics.
The ecology and evolution of microbial communities in the human gut.
The physiological and behavioral effects of climate change on birds.
The impact of invasive species on native ecosystems.
The genetic basis of developmental disorders and intellectual disabilities.
The evolution of animal behavior and communication in response to anthropogenic change.
The ecological dynamics of soil carbon sequestration and storage.
The role of microbial communities in the decomposition of organic matter.
The physiological and behavioral effects of air pollution on plants.
The molecular mechanisms of cellular differentiation and tissue development.
The ecology and evolution of plant-animal interactions.
The genetic basis of resistance to herbicides and pesticides in crops.
The impact of urbanization on bird diversity and distribution.
The role of microorganisms in the cycling of carbon and nitrogen in soil.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of invasive species interactions.
The physiological and behavioral effects of climate change on reptiles and amphibians.
The role of microbial communities in the degradation of petroleum hydrocarbons.
The genetic basis of plant development and growth.
The evolution of animal migration and dispersal.
The impact of land use change on freshwater biodiversity.
The molecular mechanisms of membrane transport and ion channels.
The role of microorganisms in the cycling of sulfur and phosphorus in soil.
The physiological and behavioral effects of ocean acidification on marine organisms.
The genetic basis of behavior and personality traits in humans.
The evolution of plant reproductive strategies and pollination systems.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of predator-prey coevolution.
The impact of environmental stressors on gene expression and epigenetics.
The evolution of sexual reproduction and mating systems in plants.
The role of microorganisms in bioremediation of contaminated sites.
The physiological and behavioral effects of climate change on fish.
The molecular mechanisms of chromatin remodeling and gene regulation.
The genetic basis of adaptation to high altitude environments.
The ecology and evolution of plant-insect interactions.
The impact of pesticide use on insect biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
The role of microorganisms in nitrogen fixation and cycling.
The genetic basis of neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline.
The evolution of social behavior and cooperation in animals.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of plant invasions.
The physiological and behavioral effects of noise pollution on humans.
The molecular mechanisms of RNA splicing and alternative splicing.
The role of microorganisms in biogeochemical cycling of trace elements.
The genetic basis of adaptation to extreme temperatures.
The ecology and evolution of microbial communities in soil and water.
The impact of climate change on insect phenology and distribution.
The molecular mechanisms of protein folding and misfolding.
The role of microorganisms in biodegradation of environmental pollutants.
The evolution of animal cognition and intelligence.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of predator-prey interactions.
The impact of anthropogenic noise on marine mammals.
The role of microorganisms in biofilm formation and quorum sensing.
The genetic basis of speciation and hybridization in plants.
The evolution of parental care and offspring development in animals.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of food web interactions.
The physiological and behavioral effects of air pollution on human health.
The molecular mechanisms of transcriptional regulation and gene expression.
The role of microorganisms in plant growth promotion and disease suppression.
The genetic basis of adaptation to drought stress in crops.
The ecology and evolution of microbial interactions in the ocean.
The impact of land use change on soil erosion and nutrient cycling.
The molecular mechanisms of autophagy and programmed cell death.
The role of microorganisms in biodegradation of pharmaceuticals.
The genetic basis of immune system variation and disease susceptibility.
The evolution of animal social networks and communication systems.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of biodiversity loss.
The physiological and behavioral effects of light pollution on nocturnal animals.
The molecular mechanisms of DNA repair and genome stability.
The role of microorganisms in the production of biofuels and bioplastics.
The genetic basis of adaptation to salinity stress in plants.
The ecology and evolution of microbial symbioses with plants and animals.
The impact of climate change on plant-pollinator interactions.
The molecular mechanisms of cellular senescence and aging.
The role of microorganisms in biodegradation of synthetic organic compounds.
The genetic basis of variation in complex traits in humans.
The evolution of animal social behavior and cultural transmission
The genetic basis of cancer development and progression.
The role of microorganisms in the gut microbiome and human health.
The genetic basis of phenotypic plasticity and adaptation in plants.
The evolution of animal migration and navigation.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of community assembly.
The physiological and behavioral effects of light and dark cycles on circadian rhythms.
The molecular mechanisms of protein synthesis and degradation.
The role of microorganisms in nitrogen and carbon cycling in aquatic ecosystems.
The genetic basis of sex determination and differentiation in animals.
The ecology and evolution of predator-prey coevolution.
The impact of anthropogenic activities on marine biodiversity and ecosystems.
The role of microorganisms in bioleaching and biomining of metals.
The genetic basis of inherited disorders and genetic diseases.
The evolution of animal social behavior and communication systems.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of competition and coexistence.
The physiological and behavioral effects of endocrine disruptors on human health.
The molecular mechanisms of cell division and mitosis.
The role of microorganisms in biodegradation of plastics and synthetic materials.
The genetic basis of epigenetic inheritance and regulation.
The ecology and evolution of mutualistic symbioses in plants and animals.
The impact of habitat fragmentation on species diversity and ecosystem functioning.
The role of microorganisms in bioremediation of oil spills.
The genetic basis of drug resistance in pathogens and cancer cells.
The evolution of animal personality and individual variation.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of biotic interactions in freshwater ecosystems.
The physiological and behavioral effects of artificial sweeteners on human health.
The molecular mechanisms of intracellular trafficking and secretion.
The role of microorganisms in biocontrol of plant pathogens and pests.
The genetic basis of hybridization and introgression in animals and plants.
The ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator mutualisms.
The impact of climate change on marine ecosystems and fisheries.
The molecular mechanisms of genome editing and gene therapy.
The role of microorganisms in biogas production and carbon capture.
The genetic basis of developmental disorders and birth defects.
The evolution of animal coloration and camouflage.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of invasive species.
The physiological and behavioral effects of air pollution on wildlife.
The molecular mechanisms of signal transduction and cell signaling.
The role of microorganisms in biodegradation of pharmaceuticals and personal care products.
The genetic basis of reproductive isolation and speciation.
The ecology and evolution of microbial interactions with plants and insects.
The impact of climate change on bird migration and breeding patterns.
The molecular mechanisms of protein-protein interactions and protein complexes.
The role of microorganisms in bioremediation of heavy metals.
The evolution of animal cognition and learning.
The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of biodiversity hotspots.
The impact of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems.
The genetics of complex diseases and personalized medicine.
The evolution of plant defense mechanisms against herbivores.
The role of microorganisms in soil carbon sequestration.
The physiological and behavioral effects of light on plant growth and development.
The molecular mechanisms of cancer metastasis and invasion.
The ecology and evolution of microbial communities in the human body.
The impact of climate change on migratory bird populations.

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Biology Research Paper Topics

Antibody and antigen
Biochemistry
Biodegradable
Biodiversity
Biological warfare
Biotechnology
Birth defects
Butterflies
Carbohydrate
Cholesterol
Circulatory system
Clone and cloning
Cockroaches
Contraception
Crustaceans
Cryobiology
Digestive system
Embryo and embryonic development
Endocrine system
Eutrophication
Excretory system
Fermentation
Fertilization
Genetic disorders
Genetic engineering
Hibernation
Horticulture
Human Genome Project
Human evolution
Immune system
Indicator species
Integumentary system
Invertebrates
Kangaroos and wallabies
Lymphatic system
Mendelian laws of inheritance
Metamorphosis
Migration (animals)
Molecular biology
Muscular system
Nervous system
Nucleic acid
Photosynthesis
Phototropism
Rain forest
Reproduction
Reproductive system
Respiration
Respiratory system
Sexually transmitted diseases
Skeletal system
Vertebrates

History of Biological Science

The history of biology begins with the careful observation of the external aspects of organisms and continues with investigations into the functions and interrelationships of living things.

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The fourth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Aristotle is credited with establishing the importance of observation and analysis as the basic approach for scientific investigation. He also organized the basic principles of dividing and subdividing plants and animals, known as classification. By A.D. 200, studies in biology were centered in the Arab world. Most of the investigations during this period were made in medicine and agriculture. Arab scientists continued this activity throughout the Middle Ages (400–1450).

Scientific investigations gained momentum during the Renaissance (a period of rebirth of art, literature, and science in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century). Italian Renaissance artists Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) produced detailed anatomical drawings of human beings. At the same time, others were dissecting cadavers (dead bodies) and describing internal anatomy. By the seventeenth century, formal experimentation was introduced into the study of biology. William Harvey (1578–1657), an English physician, demonstrated the circulation of the blood and so initiated the biological discipline of physiology.

So much work was being done in biological science during this period that academies of science and scientific journals were formed, the first being the Academy of the Lynx in Rome in 1603. The first scientific journals were established in 1665 in France and Great Britain.

The invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century opened the way for biologists to investigate living organisms at the cellular level— and ultimately at the molecular level. The first drawings of magnified life were made by Francesco Stelluti, an Italian who published drawings in 1625 of a honeybee magnified to 10 times its normal size.

During the eighteenth century, Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) developed a system for naming and classifying plants and animals that replaced the one established by Aristotle (and is still used today). Based on his observations of the characteristics of organisms, Linnaeus created a ranked system in which living things were grouped according to their similarities, with each succeeding level possessing a larger number of shared traits. He named these levels class, order, genus, and species. Linnaeus also popularized binomial nomenclature, giving each living thing a Latin name consisting of two parts—its genus and species— which distinguished it from all other organisms. For example, the wolf received the scientific name Canis lupus, while humans became Homo sapiens.

In the nineteenth century, many explorers contributed to biological science by collecting plant and animal specimens from around the world. In 1859, English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in which he outlined his theory of evolution. Darwin asserted that living organisms that best fit their environment are more likely to survive and pass their characteristics on to their offspring. His theory of evolution through natural selection was eventually accepted by most of the scientific community.

French microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) showed that living things do not arise spontaneously. He conducted experiments confirming that microorganisms cause disease, identified several disease-causing bacteria, and also developed the first vaccines. By the end of the nineteenth century, the germ theory of disease was established by German physician Robert Koch (1843–1910), and by the early twentieth century, chemotherapy (the use of chemical agents to treat or control disease) was introduced. The use of antibiotics became widespread with the development of sulfa drugs in the mid-1930s and penicillin in the early 1940s.

From the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century, the amount of research and discovery in biology has been tremendous. Two fields of rapid growth in biological science today are molecular biology and genetic engineering.

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Top 100 biology research topics for high school and college.

Writing a biology essay may not sound like a very difficult thing to do. In fact, most students really like this subject. The problem is not that you can’t write a good paper on a topic in biology. The problem is with finding excellent biology research topics. Now, you may be wondering why you would want to invest so much time into finding great biology research paper topics. After all, what you write in the essay matters more than the topic, right? Wrong! We are here to tell you that professors really appreciate interesting and unique topics.

And it makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. If you simply pick one of the most popular biology research topics, you will never be able to pique the interest of your teacher. He has read dozens, if not hundreds, or papers on that exact same topic. What you want to do is come up with interesting biology research topics. You want to find topics that none of your classmates are thinking of writing an academic paper about. You will shortly see why this is important. And we will also give you 100 biology topics for research projects that you can use for free – right now!

Biology Research Paper Topics Really Are Important!

It doesn’t matter what area of biology you need to write about. This information applies to everything from zoology and botany to anatomy. The reality is that your professor will really appreciate good topics. And you can rest assured that he or she knows how to spot them. The moment the professor starts to read your paper, he or she will immediately realize that you really did your best to find an excellent topic. And if you write a good introduction paragraph (which contains a captivating thesis statement as well), you are in the best position to earn bonus points.

You may not be aware of it, but teachers are willing to treat great papers with more leniency. This means that you will not get penalized for minor mistakes if you come up with a great topic. In other words, you will get a better grade on your papers if you manage to come up with good research topics for biology. This is a fact and it is based on thousands of pieces of feedback from our readers.

How Do You Choose Good Biology Research Topics?

Choosing research topics for biology can be a daunting task. Frankly, the research paper topics biology students are looking for are not easy to come by. The first thing you want to avoid is going to the first website that pops up in Google and getting your ideas from there. Most of your peers will do the same. Also, avoid topics that are extremely simple. You will simply not have enough ideas to write about. Of course, you should avoid overly complex topics because finding information about them may be extremely difficult.

The best way to find a good topic, in our opinion, is to get in touch with an academic writing company. You will get access to a professional writer who knows exactly what professors are looking for. A writer will quickly give you an amazing research topic in biology.

Eloquent Examples of Popular Biology Research Topics

To make things as simple as possible for you, we’ve put together a list of biology research project ideas. You will find 100 topics on various subjects below. Of course, you can use any of our topics for free. However, keep in mind that even though we are doing our best to maintain this list fresh, other students will find it as well. If you need new topics for your next biology essay, we recommend you to get in touch with us. We monitor our email address, so we can help you right away. Also, you can buy a research paper from our service.

Biology Research Topics for High School

Are you looking for biology research topics for high school? These are relatively simple when compared to college-level topics. Here are a couple of topic ideas that high school students will surely appreciate:

Identifying Three Dead Branches of Evolution.
What Is Sleep?
How Does Physical Exercise Affect the Metabolism?
A Behavioral Study of Birds.
How Does Music Affect Your Brain?
Climate Change and Biodiversity.
Are Bees Really Becoming Extinct?
Rainforest Extinction Is Dangerous.
The Benefits of Organic Farming.
Can the Brain Repair Itself?
The Effect of Bacteria on Depression.
How Do Sea Animals Camouflage?

Research Topics in Biology for Undergraduates

Research topics in biology for undergraduates are more complex than high school or college topics. Our researchers did their best to find topics that are relatively complex. However, each one of the following topics has plenty of information about it online:

What Is the Mechanism of Metastasis in Cancer Patients?
How Do Tumor Suppressor Genes Appear?
How Can We Destroy Cancer Cells Without Damaging Other Cells?
The Benefits of Gene Therapy.
Analyzing the Huntington’s Disease (the HTT Gene).
How Does the down Syndrome (Trisomy of 21st Chromosome) Appear?
Analyzing the Brain Activity During an Epileptic Seizure.
How Are Our Memories Formed and Preserved?
The Effect of Probiotics on Infections.
Analyzing Primate Language.
Analyzing Primate Cognitive Functions.
The Link Between Darwin’s Theory and Biology.

Biology Research Topics for College Students

Biology research topics for college students are of moderate difficulty. They are easier than undergrad topics and more complex than high school topics. While compiling this list, we made sure you have more than enough information online to write the paper quickly:

Using DNA Technology in the Field of Medical Genetics.
The Effect of Drinking on Embryonic Development.
How Are Genes Mapped and Cloned?
Explain What Genetic Polymorphism Is.
What Is a Hereditary Disease?
The Effect of Drugs on Embryonic Development.
Describing Oligogenic Diseases (like Hirschsprung Disease)
What Is the Mendelian Inheritance?
How Transcriptomics and Proteomics Changed Modern Medicine.
The Risk Factors of Infertility Explained.
How Does Aging Effect Infertility?
What Do Ash Elements Do in a Plant?
Explaining the Pigments in a Plant Cell.
How Is Photosynthesis Done?
The Role of Fats in Plant Cells.
The Effect of Smoking on Embryonic Development.

Cell Biology Research Topics

Some of the best biology topics are cell biology research topics. The scientific community is constantly making progress in this area, so there is always something new to write about. Here are some of the best examples:

What Is Regenerative Medicine?
A Closer Look at Tissue Engineering.
Discuss the Future of Regenerative Medicine.
Analyzing Therapeutic Cloning.
The Pros and Cons of Creating Artificial Organs.
How Do Cell Age?
Can We Reverse Cell Aging?
Advances in Cell Therapy.
What Is Cell Adhesion?
Explaining Cell Division.
What Is Cellular Metabolism?
Describe Active and Passive Transport in Cells.
What Are Cell Plastids?

Evolutionary Biology Research Paper Topics

If you want something more complex, you can try your hand at writing on evolutionary biology research paper topics. As with all our topics, you will be able to find a lot of ideas and information online. Here are our picks:

Where Did Plants Come From? (The Evolutionary Theory)
Explaining the Host-parasite Coevolution.
How Did Parasites Evolve over Time?
What Is Natural Selection and How Does It Work?
Explain Sexual Selection.
Explain Sexual Conflict.
How Did Our Immune Systems Evolve?
How Do New Species Appear in the Wild?
The Evolution of Cell Respiration.
What Is the Hippo Pathway? (Developmental Biology)

Various Topics

Antibiotics resistance, agriculture and cloning are hot subjects nowadays. Your professor will surely be interested to learn more about biology research topics. Here is a mix of topic ideas from our established community of academic writers:

The Problem of Using Antibiotics on Large Scale.
Examining the Effects of Salt on Plants.
What Is DNA Technology?
The Effects of GMOs on the Human Body.
How Is the Quality of Antibiotics Controlled?
How Are GMO Food Crops Created?
The Effect of Veterinary Antibiotics on Humans.
The Allergic Reactions to Specific Antibiotics.
A Look at How Penicillin Works in the Human Body.
How Are Antibiotics Obtained?
What Are Natural Biochemicals with Pest-repellent Properties?
The 3 Most Toxic Effects of Antibiotics
How the Human Body Develops Resistance to Antibiotics.
The Impact of Biology on the Us Agriculture.
What Is the Green Revolution?
Analyzing the Minerals in the Plant Cell.
Analyzing Muscle Development and Regeneration
The Uses of Cancer Stem Cells.

Marine Biology Research Topics

There is a lot of talk about global warming, about microplastics in our oceans, and about endangered marine species. This means that marine biology research topics are a very hot topic today. Here are some of our best ideas:

Can GMO Organisms Break down Oil after Maritime Accidents?
Pollution-absorbing Bio-films.
Microbes That Can Absorb Toxic Compounds in the Water.
Can We Really Use Bioluminescence?
How Is Bio-diesel Created?
Analyzing the Coral Reef Biology.
Why Is the Lobster Population Dwindling?
The Effect of Mass Fishing on the World’s Oceans.
Global Warming and Its Effect on Marine Microorganisms.

Molecular Biology Research Topics

Writing about molecular biology research topics is not easy. However, it’s a foolproof way to get a top grade. Your professor will really appreciate your willingness to write an essay about a complex topic. Just make sure you know what you are talking about. Below you can find some of the best topics:

How Is Insulin Produced?
How Is the Growth Hormone Produced?
Analyzing the Repropagation of Translation.
What Is DNA-telomerase?
The Process of Sequencing Nucleotides in DNA.
What Is Telomerase?
The Link Between Telomerase and Cancer.
The Link Between Telomerase and Aging.
How Does DNA Forensics Work?
Describe the Process of Protein Metabolism.

There is no such thing as easy biology research topics. When the topic is too simple, you end up getting penalized. You can’t write 500 words about it without straying away from the subject. Also, no matter how interesting the topic may be, you should make sure that the essay is written perfectly. This means that not even interesting biology research topics can save you from a bad grade if you fail to follow all applicable academic writing standards.

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A Research Guide
Research Paper Topics

120 Biology Research Paper Topics

How to choose a topic for biology research paper:, cell biology research paper topics:.

The role of mitochondria in cellular metabolism
Cellular mechanisms of cancer development and progression
Stem cell therapy: potential applications and challenges
The impact of oxidative stress on cellular aging
Cellular signaling pathways in immune response
The role of autophagy in cellular homeostasis
Cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases
The role of telomeres in cellular senescence
Cellular mechanisms of drug resistance in cancer cells
The impact of epigenetics on cellular gene expression
Cellular mechanisms of viral infection and replication
The role of cellular adhesion molecules in tissue development
Cellular mechanisms of apoptosis and programmed cell death
The impact of cellular stress on protein folding and misfolding
Cellular mechanisms of DNA repair and genome stability

Marine Biology Research Paper Topics:

The impact of climate change on coral reef ecosystems
The role of marine protected areas in conserving biodiversity
The effects of ocean acidification on marine organisms
Investigating the behavior and communication patterns of marine mammals
The ecological significance of seagrass meadows in coastal ecosystems
The role of microplastics in marine pollution and their impact on marine life
Exploring the genetic diversity and adaptation of deep-sea organisms
Understanding the migration patterns of marine species
Investigating the effects of overfishing on marine food webs
The role of marine bacteria in nutrient cycling and ecosystem functioning
Assessing the impacts of oil spills on marine ecosystems
Investigating the reproductive strategies of marine invertebrates
The effects of noise pollution on marine animals
Understanding the ecological role of marine viruses
Investigating the impacts of invasive species on native marine communities

Human Biology Research Paper Topics:

The impact of genetics on human behavior
The role of hormones in human development and growth
The effects of stress on the human immune system
The relationship between nutrition and brain development
The influence of exercise on cardiovascular health
The role of genetics in determining susceptibility to diseases
The impact of environmental factors on human fertility
The effects of aging on the human musculoskeletal system
The relationship between sleep patterns and cognitive function
The role of gut microbiota in human digestion and metabolism
The effects of pollution on respiratory health
The impact of technology on human vision and eye health
The relationship between mental health disorders and brain chemistry
The effects of different diets on human metabolism
The role of genetics in determining human intelligence

Molecular Biology Research Paper Topics:

Role of microRNAs in gene regulation
CRISPR-Cas9 technology and its applications in gene editing
Epigenetic modifications and their impact on gene expression
Mechanisms of DNA repair and their implications in cancer development
The role of non-coding RNAs in cellular processes
Molecular basis of aging and age-related diseases
Genetic and molecular factors contributing to neurodegenerative disorders
Molecular mechanisms underlying drug resistance in cancer cells
Regulation of cell cycle progression and its implications in cancer
Molecular basis of stem cell differentiation and pluripotency
Role of molecular chaperones in protein folding and quality control
Molecular mechanisms of immune response and immunotherapy approaches
Molecular basis of genetic disorders and potential therapeutic strategies
Molecular mechanisms of viral replication and host-virus interactions
Molecular basis of circadian rhythms and their impact on health and disease

Plant Biology Research Paper Topics:

The role of plant hormones in growth and development
Investigating the effects of climate change on plant physiology
Understanding the mechanisms of plant defense against pathogens
Exploring the genetic basis of plant adaptation to different environments
Investigating the role of mycorrhizal fungi in plant nutrient uptake
Studying the impact of pollutants on plant health and ecosystem functioning
Investigating the molecular mechanisms of plant photosynthesis
Understanding the role of plant secondary metabolites in defense against herbivores
Exploring the genetic diversity and conservation of endangered plant species
Investigating the role of plant root microbiota in nutrient acquisition
Studying the impact of invasive plant species on native ecosystems
Investigating the effects of light quality on plant growth and development
Understanding the mechanisms of plant responses to abiotic stressors (drought, salinity, etc
Exploring the role of plant epigenetics in gene regulation and development
Investigating the potential of plant-based biofuels as a sustainable energy source

Animal Biology Research Paper Topics:

The impact of climate change on animal migration patterns
The role of genetics in determining animal behavior
The effects of pollution on aquatic animal populations
The relationship between diet and gut microbiota in herbivorous animals
The impact of deforestation on biodiversity and animal habitats
The physiological adaptations of animals to extreme environments
The role of animal communication in social behavior and mating strategies
The effects of noise pollution on animal communication and navigation
The evolutionary significance of animal coloration and patterns
The role of hormones in regulating animal reproductive cycles
The impact of invasive species on native animal populations
The physiological mechanisms of hibernation in mammals
The effects of artificial light at night on animal behavior and ecology
The role of animal cognition in problem-solving and learning abilities
The genetic basis of animal diseases and potential treatments

Chemical Biology Research Paper Topics:

Targeting cancer cells using nanotechnology-based drug delivery systems
Development of novel antibiotics to combat drug-resistant bacteria
Investigating the role of epigenetics in gene regulation and disease development
Design and synthesis of small molecule inhibitors for protein kinases
Understanding the mechanism of action of natural products as potential therapeutics
Engineering enzymes for biocatalysis and industrial applications
Exploring the chemical biology of neurodegenerative diseases
Designing and optimizing drug delivery systems for targeted therapy
Investigating the role of metal ions in biological systems and disease progression
Development of biosensors for rapid and sensitive detection of biomarkers
Understanding the molecular basis of drug resistance in cancer cells
Design and synthesis of fluorescent probes for imaging cellular processes
Investigating the role of non-coding RNAs in gene regulation and disease development
Development of novel strategies for protein engineering and directed evolution
Exploring the chemical biology of stem cells and tissue regeneration

Evolutionary Biology Research Paper Topics:

The role of natural selection in shaping animal behavior
Evolutionary mechanisms behind the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria
The impact of climate change on species adaptation and evolution
Evolutionary patterns and processes in human populations
The role of sexual selection in the evolution of elaborate traits
Evolutionary consequences of invasive species on native ecosystems
The evolution of social behavior in insects
Genetic basis of speciation and the formation of new species
Evolutionary origins and adaptations of venomous animals
The co-evolution of parasites and their hosts
Evolutionary genetics of disease resistance in plants
The evolution of mating systems and reproductive strategies
Evolutionary mechanisms underlying the evolution of complex traits
The role of genetic drift in small populations and its impact on evolution
Evolutionary implications of hybridization and introgression in plants and animals

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The Ultimate Compilation of Unique Biology Research Paper Topics

Studying biology is essential for us to comprehend the intricacies of life. That is why students are often asked to research the subject. One of the most important parts of this process is choosing the right topic about biology.

Speaking of which, if you’re struggling to pick one, don’t worry as this blog post is meant to provide you with some great options. These research ideas are certain to get you on the right track for writing a paper like the professional paper writing services providers. So, let’s get started!

Table of Contents

5 Top Biology Research Topics with Thesis Statements

If you are in a hurry, you can go with any of these five biological research topics. Each has a thesis statement to get you started right away.

300 Amazing Biology Research Topics to Help You Score an A+

Having a quality topic is the foundation of any successful research project. It’s like a roadmap that leads you to uncover all the amazing knowledge about the subject.

We’ve handpicked the following topics to ensure you go beyond the basics in your biology research. Let’s get started!

Research Topics on the History of Biology

If you’re looking to explore the history of biology, you’ve got tons of ideas to choose from. Here’s the list:

Philosophy and Biology: Side by side chronicles
Biology as contemporary in the beginning
Mendelian biology: Dimensions and aspects
Experimental Biology in the Age of Industrialization
A historical overview of biology education in the USA
The history of biology is divided into three major stages
Pioneers of biology in ancient ages: Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Xenophanes of Colophon, and Parmenides of Elea
Aristotle the Father of Zoology
The Invention of the Microscope: Its Role in the Evolution of Biology
Themes and breakthroughs that modern biology is based on
Biology in Middle Ages
Role of Muslim Scientists in the Development of Physiology and Biology
Ibn Sina: The pioneer of modern medicine
Francis Crick’s Central Dogma on the Flow of Information
The Chromosomal Theory of Inheritance
Mendel’s Laws
Importance of the cell as the fundamental anatomical unit of all living organisms
Robert Hooke: The first scientist to use the word “cell”
Mathias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann: The scientists to declare the cell as the central entity of the anatomical structure
The third postulate of the Cell Theory
Classification of organisms, animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms
Evolution in biology
History of molecular biology
Ronald Fisher: Works in Genetics and Mathematics
Wallace and Darwin: discoverers of evolution
Von Humboldt: as the universal scientist and his dedication to biology
Botany and the Consolidation of modern science
Conceptual Biography of the Gene
Aristotle, secretary of nature and pioneer of biology
Darwin’s intellectual roots
Genetic determinism and journalism
History of Biology in the United States
Biology in the last quarter century
Biological research in the Middle Ages
Milestones in the History of Biology
The Microscope and the Expansion of Biology

Human Biology Research Topics

There’s so much to explore when it comes to human biology nowadays! Stem cells and cloning are two of the most fascinating topics out there. Here are some other biological topics for research:

Human Health: Clinical analysis, human reproduction, nutrition, handling of instruments
Research, development, and control of biotechnological processes
Teaching and transmission/dissemination of knowledge in Biology both to future professionals and to society in general
All those activities that are related to Biology collect the new activities that continually emerge and will do so in the future
Genetic Studies and their Application
Nature and control of their action: Study of biological products
Global warming and pollution: evaluation of reproductive and developmental toxicity.
Role of ketone bodies in the control of metabolism: focus on the fatty organ
Bioactive Food Components as Modulators of mitochondrial function in Autism
Identification, expression, and functional characterization of tRNA-derived stress-induced RNAs produced by angiogenin in human skin cell lines
Development of a hybrid system: antimicrobial peptides / ceramic nanoparticles active against oral pathogens.
Metabolism and process optimization in algal flours for food
Transcriptional role of PARP1 in skin cancers.
Evaluation of the role of the High-Temperature Requirement A1 serine protease (HtrA1) in osteochondral tissues
Development of in vitro cell models for the study of human microbiota interactions and bone remodeling
Study of molecules involved in the central regulation of the energy balance
Evaluation of anti-inflammatory molecules to combat obesity and related diseases
Diagnosis of gestational diseases such as Preeclampsia and Gestational Diabetes

Neurobiology Research Topics

If you are more interested in delving into the complexities of neurobiology, here’s the list of topics to consider for writing your research paper .

Strong receptors in females for higher pain perception
Purinergic Contribution to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Non-motor behavioral phenotypes: effect of age and gender
The deficit in attachment behavior in mice lacking the mu-opioid receptor gene
Parkinson’s disease and related syndromes
Therapeutic interventions or new drugs to prevent pathological brain aging or slow down the evolution of proven pathologies
Contributions of innovative technologies for the compensation of handicaps affecting language and memory
Action semantic disorders in neurodegenerative pathologies affecting the motor system
Sensory-motor processing and plasticity
Neural Circuits & Behavior
Homeostasis, Perception, and States
Development & Evolution of the Neural Crest
Code neuronal & perception auditive
Neurogenetics of Drosophila
Molecular evolution of the transcriptome and genome of cave-dwelling Astyanax
Developmental evolution of the brain of cave-dwelling Astyanax
Neuronal and synaptic functions and development
Aging, neurodegenerative diseases, and other neurological disorders
Mental Health and Addiction
Pain, inflammation, trauma, and brain repair
Vision and cognitive neuroscience
Evaluative research on neurological disorders
Clinical evaluation and treatment of neurological disorders

Evolutionary Biology Research Topics

Certainly, studying evolutionary processes could be quite an intriguing idea for your biology research. Here are some topics for you to look into:

Interactions between microorganisms – environment, ecotoxicology
Symbiotic relationships
Chemistry and biology of microbial metabolites
Diversity and evolutionary history of microorganisms
Cyanobacteria, Cyanotoxins, and Environment
Parasites and Free Protists
Chemistry of Fungal Natural Products
Biochemistry of Microbial Interaction
Are vaccines a godsend for germs?
We are born with a musical brain
Warm-blooded animals
The origin of mental disorders
The cerebellum, the first original organ in living things
The surprising evolutionary success of oaks
The origin of our instincts: the mark of evolution
A new scenario of the conquest of continents by plants
Sign languages: a better-understood history
Evolution: the brain lobe that made us human
When men colonized the peaks of Africa
The Complex History of Cow Domestication
The mutations of the theory of evolution
Memory in survival mode
The origin of green-blooded lizards
Cancer according to Darwin
Evolution: networks rather than trees
The real story of skin colors

Animals Biology Research Topics

If animal biology is something that spikes your interest, then picking up a topic from this list could be a good option. Here you go:

Role of Cystatin B in synaptic plasticity in the mammalian brain
Contribution to the study of the quality of processed products, water used in dairy farms
Monitoring the activities of water birds at the lake of the Zoological and Forest Park of Hann
Agriculture, agronomy, welfare
Animals for hunting, racing, and bullfighting
Wild animals – Conservation
Wildlife Behavior, ethology
Animal rights: legal status, protection, regulations
Importance of ethics in animal biology
Stunning and slaughter of animals
Animal experimentation, alternative methods
Sociology, social sciences involved in the animal sciences
Animal welfare: ethics put to the test of economics
Local initiatives to promote the protection of nature and the well-being of animals
Livestock farming is a sharing of meaning between humans and animals
Ethology and conservation of animal species
Dogs and the environment: observation and treatment of some undesirable behaviors
The contribution of Konrad Lorenz to the study of animal behavior
Bioethics and legal regime of free and captive wild animals
From the diversity of legal protections for animals to the search for the status of animality
Reasoning structures in a developmental neurobiology laboratory: a study from a cognitive ecology perspective
Evolutionary biology, systematics, biogeography, and conservation biology of Insects
Animal ecology, behavioral ecology, management and conservation of animal populations
Conservation biology and identification of conservation priorities
Genetic and systematic structure and molecular evolution in animal taxa of the Mediterranean area
Evolutionary biology, biogeography, and taxonomy of underground arthropods
Evolutionary and ecological Aspects in Crustaceans
Biology and eco-ethology of Formicides
Evolutionary Biology of Bone Fish
Microevolution and speciation in rodents
Comparative neurobiology

Anatomy Research Topics in Biology

Exploring the human body is interesting! Here’s a list of topics you can research about specific organs or body parts.

Directional terms and anatomical planes
Types of body movements
Major muscles of the upper limb
Vascularization and innervation of the elbow and forearm
Main muscles of the lower limb
Vascularization and innervation of the leg and knee
Abdominal wall muscles
Sistema cardiovascular
Liver Overview
Scrotum and spermatic cord
How to learn anatomy holistically
Knowing the origin and organization of cells
Supervised practical work in the autopsy room
Understanding the fundamentals of cyton-histological techniques
Analyze and diagnose images obtained in optical microscopy
Relate the structure and functions of the cellular and extracellular components that make up human tissues
Optical Microscope Study of Nervous Tissue
Optical microscope study of muscle tissue
Optical microscope study of the connective tissue
Optical Microscope Study of the Epithelial Tissue
Study of the cardiocirculatory system on preparations, reconstructions, and anatomical models.
Study of the respiratory system on reconstructions, anatomical models, preparations, and imaging techniques.
Study of the digestive system on reconstructions and anatomical models
Study of the urinary system and the male and female genitalia on reconstructions and anatomical models
Study of the endocrine glands on schemes and reconstructions
Study of the rock and the orbit on the skull. Study of the sense of hearing in reconstructions and anatomical models
Study of the sense of sight in reconstructions and anatomical models
Study of the morphology and organization of the spinal cord, brainstem, and cerebellum on schemes and preparations
Study of the morphology and organization of the diencephalon and the telencephalon on schemes and preparations
Study Methods in Cytology and Histology
Histological techniques of electron microscopy
Neuromuscular systems of the head and neck
An osteoarticular substrate of the skull
Osteoarticular substrate and muscles of the chest wall
Irrigation of the Central Nervous System
The overall study of the main nerve pathways
Introduction to the Study of the Senses
Anatomical study of the endocrine system as a whole
Digestive system: Digestive tube and associated glands
Respiratory system: Upper and lower respiratory tract

Botany Research Paper Topics

Are you up for writing a paper about plants? Check out some of the most recent discoveries in botany for ideas.

Techniques and methods for the sustainable use, conservation, and restoration of ecosystems
Inventory and characterization of biodiversity: flora, fauna, and fungi
Carbon forms and cycles in the soil
Endemic and threatened species
Entomofauna of arid zones
Effects of global change on Biodiversity and the Functioning of Ecosystems
Mediterranean and arid ecosystems and habitats
Popularization of mycology
Distribution and abundance of species as indicators of global change
Distribution of soils in the landscape
Functional aspects of biodiversity
Application of remote sensing and sig to the sustainable management of ecosystems
Biotech crops more resistant to drought
Botanical Resources
Assessment of the natural environment and agroforestry management
Plant Dynamics and Study of plant communities
Plant Mapping and Restoration Models
Restoration of vegetation in degraded spaces
Pollen biology
Aerobiology
Evolution and Development
Conservation Genetics and Phylogeography
Molecular systematics in plants and fungi
Urban Forests, Green Infrastructure, Urban Green Zones
Mycology: Flora, vegetation, and autecology of lichenized fungi
Ornamental flora, history of landscape and gardens
The benefits of traditional knowledge about plants
The fall of the leaves, conditioned by the flowering
A new look at medicinal plants
The root microbiota
Lichens: environmental watchdogs
The geometry of the seeds
Genetic basis of seedless fruits
Molecular control of pollination
Applied forestry plumbing
Genetics of mycorrhizal symbiosis
Bryophytes in mountain streams
Management of invasive plants
Pathogenic Fungi in the Jungle
Molecular bases of flowering
Fire and Evolution in the Mediterranean
Gravitropism vs. Phototropism
Red algae in the Mediterranean

Molecular Biology Research Topics

If molecular biology is your thing, then you should consider researching one of these topics:

Role of mitochondria-associated ER membranes (MAM) in cellular homeostasis
Biology of myeloid cells
Molecular Biology of Chromosomes
Molecular Biology of Gametogenesis
Molecular Parasitology Laboratory
DNA Replication and Genome Integrity
Chromosomal Dynamics in Meiosis
Cell-Biomaterial Recognition
Gene Expression and Gene Transfer in Bacteria
Autophagy Laboratory
Immunotherapy
Innate immune memory: molecular mechanisms and applications
Metabolism, Microbes, and Macrophages; a Liver Saga
Lignocellulosic Biofuels for the Transportation Sector
Identification and characterization of genes involved in response to cold stress
The role of proteins of the MBF1 family in the stress-ripening interaction in tomato fruit

Behavior and Hormones Biology Research Topics

Determination of reference values for the evaluation of thyroid function in sport equine breeds
Ultrasound evaluation of the adrenal glands in dogs without clinical signs of adrenal pathology
Application concentrations of biostimulant
Systematization of growth tests in solid culture media for wildwood decomposing fungi
Immunomodulatory role of mineralocorticoid receptor activation by corticosterone
Biology in Adolescence, a psychoanalytic perspective
Comparative Analysis of HEK293 Cells in Culture and Adenovirus Production
Hormones and neurotransmitters
The chemistry of moods
Memory and Mood Triggers: Anatomy of the Limbic System

Abortion, Human cloning, Genetic Researches Biology Topics

The role of legal and social conditions in the trajectories and subjective experiences of women in the face of induced abortion
The relationship between abortion and women living with HIV
Induced abortion and its relationship with the marital status of women and age.
The relationship between pregnancies resulting from sexual coercion and abortion
The relationship of women with health services in different legal contexts
The use of medical abortion in restrictive legal settings
The impact of the secrecy and the illegality of the practice
Reasons for abortion in developing countries
Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine
Therapeutic cloning to create embryonic stem cells
Reproductive cloning to create copies of whole animals
Genetic cloning, to create copies of genes or segments of DNA
How are genes cloned?
How are animals cloned?
Cloning of Wooly Mammoths
Animals that scientists have cloned till now
What are the possible applications of cloned animals?
What are the possible harms of animal cloning?

Zoology Research Topics

Having trouble coming up with ideas for your zoology paper? Don’t worry, you can always count on the professional expertise of our writers . We’ve also got a list of ideas that might help you out.

Sustainable forest planning and Management
Ancient forests
Biological diversity
Landscape structure
Wildlife-habitat modeling
Forest birds
Forest ecology
Animal communities
Evolution of sexual dimorphism
Integrated resource management
Behavioral ecology
Ecological immunology
Defense mechanism
Forest management, biodiversity, and tree demography
Sustainable forest management
Ecosystem functioning
A Study of the malaria vector in African Countries
Natural History of Terrestrial Amphibians and Reptiles
Atlas of Amphibians and Reptiles in Europe
Amphibians of Central Africa and AngolaIllustrated Determination Key of the Amphibians of Gabon and Mbini
Acoustic Ecology of European BatsIdentification of species
Insects of Mount Wilhelm Papua New Guinea
Atlas of wild mammals of the United States of America

Exploring the world of biology has plenty of potential for amazing discoveries. With this collection of unique research topics, there’s a gateway to endless possibilities. Ensure to pick an interesting subject to make a big contribution to the knowledge of life. Still, if you are having trouble tackling your research paper, order now so one of our experts could take care of it for you.

What are the major biological issues today?

Major biological issues today include:

Biodiversity Loss
Climate Change Impacts
Emerging Infectious Diseases
Genetic Engineering Ethics
Antibiotic Resistance
Conservation of Endangered Species

Why is it important to choose a specific research topic in biology?

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100 Fascinating Biology Research Paper Topics for Students

15 January, 2021

11 minutes read

Author: Elizabeth Brown

Biology research is a serious analytical task that usually contains scientific findings, debatable questions, and detailed explanations. Students who are studying biology may get an assignment to find some interesting biological topics to do research for essays, term papers, and scientific reports.

It is quite a challenging and overwhelming task that takes pretty much time and effort. If your topic is not relevant, you won’t be able to include a scientific argument and proceed with further discussion. In this article, you will discover some topics for biology projects that will help you gain attention in a rapidly evolving field like this.

How to Choose Topic for Biology Research Paper?

Well, you’ve been researching for a while now, and you are ready to focus on a particular topic. Professors often ask students to write about something that has not been researched for a hundred times. Among all topics in biology, you should choose the one you are actually interested in. There are certain tips you need to follow before opting for your topic:

Narrow down the subject matter. Before choosing an interesting biology topic for your research paper, you first need to identify a particular aspect of biology that interests you.
Examine the existing research papers. You should conduct thorough research on the existing scholarly articles in order to gain a better idea about recent trends in the particular sphere of Biology.
Brainstorm a particular area . By brainstorming ideas and thoughts, you may find the ideal research topic for biology to focus on.
Conduct a preliminary research . By conducting preliminary research, you will check the amount of materials covering the selected topic. If you fail to find any information, you should choose another topic.
Have a look at relevant examples . Checking credible examples is important for biology topics selection. This way, you will learn how to structure your research paper and go about the selected topic.

History of Biology

Do you consider covering the history of Biology in your research? Then, you may refer to the history of all life forms on the planet and explore how they have been researched over time. Here are some topics to dwell on:

How archeology influences animal biology?
The latest explanation of Darwin’s theory in modern science
Edward Jenner and his contribution to the fight against epidemics
The dead branches of evolution
Exploring the importance of evolution factors
Study of modern theories related to the origins of humankind
The contribution of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to the science of Biology
The most significant milestones in the development of behavioral mechanisms in the late XIX – early XX centuries
Can we trust the Natural Selection Theory? Does it work in the human world?
The development of genetics over the last century

Immune System Biology Research Topics

The immune system, as our main defense against different diseases and infections, is one of the most important topics for discussion in Biology. Take a look at the following topic examples:

The resistance capacity of the human immune system
Why is vaccination important and what are its benefits?
Problems caused by immunotherapy
Effects of probiotics on the prevention of infections
How poor immunity leads to fatal diseases
The functions of immune system agents
The resistance of the human immune system
Medical conditions caused by immune system malfunction
How does insomnia influence the human immune system?
Molecular biology of Human Immunodeficiency Virus

Molecular Biology Topics

Are you looking for a molecular biology issue to cover in your research paper? The following topics represent the latest research on this subject matter.

The effective ways and tools for effective lifetime prolongation
The role of genetically modified crops for the national economy
Molecular biology research in the United States
Can Ebola be viewed as a biological weapon?
The effect on antibiotics on cells
Challenges caused by diseases to molecular biology
Does molecular biological research of rare genetic disorders provide us with the keys to understanding cancer and other diseases?
What are the biological reasons behind food intolerances?
Production of growth hormone and insulin in genetic engineering
Molecular chaperones and their role in polypeptides folding

Genetic Researches Biology Topics

Research on genetic concepts can reveal intriguing insights into human nature and potential. The variety of options here is unlimited. Some of them include the following:

How to solve the ethical dilemma of human cloning?
The recent implementation of genetic disorders treatment
Modern technology in DNA analysis
The process of DNA modification on smoking females
Methods of the sequencing of nucleotide sequences of DNA
DNA Modifications and its Effects on Humans
Genetics of chromosomal diseases related to structural chromosome rearrangements
Genetics behind human physical features
DNA diagnosis of hereditary and infectious diseases
Can DNA influence the process of aging?

Neurobiology Research Topics

The human brain is intriguing, as there are always some new things to learn. The following topics have a great study potential:

The improvement of brain activities with the most advanced neurobiology aids
The innovative technologies in neurobiology
Does gut bacteria lead to depression?
Genetic defects that cause schizophrenia
The molecular and gene regulatory signature of a neuron
The influence of music on cognitive processes in a human brain
What are the negative consequences associated with neurosurgery?
Formation of thinking, speech, and consciousness of an average person
Neurobiological Explanation of Sleep
The role of neuroscience in the development of robotic technologies

Plant Research Topics

Are you interested in writing a paper about plants? Here are some of the latest ideas in botany to get inspiration by:

How does climate change affect biodiversity in Australia?
The evolutionary factors that affect plant growth
A comparative analysis of invasive plants in New Zealand
Friction in the plant world
How modern technology can facilitate plant disease treatment
Disease resistance mechanism in plants
An extensive research on plant-associated microbes and available genomic tools
Feature and functions of photosynthesis
Impact of electric current on plant cells
Plant cells plastids structure and function

Ecological Subjects

Ecology-concerning subjects are becoming more and more popular as society has to deal with the results of human behavior all the time. In your biology research study, you can offer some new solutions to ecological problems in order to turn the world into a better place. Let’s review some popular topic examples:

Exploring the relevance of chemical ecology in the context of Oceania
The impact of Ecological factors on animal behavior
Ways animals and plants adapt to fast-changing environment
Explore the ecological footprint of cotton production
The ecological approach to sustainable marine research
Why does biodiversity need to be conserved?
Consequences of building the Hetch Hetchy valley dam
What causes toxic algae bloom?
Indoor air pollution: causes and risks
The devastating impact of deforestation in Amazon forests

If you are interested in the animal world , feel free to write about it in your research paper. By conducting a deep analysis of one phenomenon or species, you may shed light on the growing problems. Some of the burning topics to consider include the following:

How the mechanism of camouflage is used by sea animals?
How does veganism affect meat production?
How do humans influence the diversity of animal species?
The mechanism of resistance in animals
Domestication: can foxes become domestic animals?
Possibility of homosexual connections in the world of animals
The future of the planet through the prism of Species Extinction
Can beauty products testing on animals be viewed as ethical?
Evolutionary connections between moths and butterflies
The importance of home diet for dogs

Behavior and Hormones

You can also share ideas on how human hormones influence their mood and well-being. A short list of topic samples covers the following:

How hormones affect women’s behavior during pregnancy
Psychopathic Disorders: Are They Hormone-Specific?
The hormones disorder and constant depression
How does your brain control your behavior?
The three main psychopathic disorders influenced by hormones
Analyze the features of oxytocin that turn this hormone into a love drug
How to generate growth hormone by means of genetic engineering methods?
Biologic basis of the bipolar disorder
The influence of diabetes and its potential threats
The role of hormones in women’s health

Easy Biology Research Topics

If you don’t know what to write about in your biology research paper, you can use one of the most common topics. Although they have been widely covered by scientists, it doesn’t mean they are not suitable for further research. These topic ideas might come in handy:

How to prevent the risks related to global warming?
The future prospects of molecular biology in Europe
Is growing organs for transplantation in laboratories ethical?
How is melatonin used for therapy purposes?
What is the value of sustainability in Biology?
Explore the effects of marijuana on the human brain. Should the use of marijuana become legal?
Accuracy of DNA testing in the modern medical environment
Different ecological pyramids and the ratio of organisms at each of their levels
The positive and negative aspects of transgenic crops
Various means of wildlife protection

Biology research is one of the most complicated academic assignments that needs to be written according to strict requirements. While checking the variety of biology research topics, you should be ready to deal with certain problems, such as a poor understanding of the subject matter, its value for society, etc. Try to select a brief and concise topic that can be supported with relevant and up-to-date evidence. Make sure to conduct thorough research by using all the available tools and methods you know. Remember that the importance and timely revelation of the topic increases your chances to get an excellent grade eventually.

If you are still unsure on whether you can cope with your task – you are in the right place to get help. Our essay writers know the perfect answer to the question “Who can write my paper?”

A life lesson in Romeo and Juliet taught by death

Due to human nature, we draw conclusions only when life gives us a lesson since the experience of others is not so effective and powerful. Therefore, when analyzing and sorting out common problems we face, we may trace a parallel with well-known book characters or real historical figures. Moreover, we often compare our situations with […]

Ethical Research Paper Topics

Writing a research paper on ethics is not an easy task, especially if you do not possess excellent writing skills and do not like to contemplate controversial questions. But an ethics course is obligatory in all higher education institutions, and students have to look for a way out and be creative. When you find an […]

Art Research Paper Topics

Students obtaining degrees in fine art and art & design programs most commonly need to write a paper on art topics. However, this subject is becoming more popular in educational institutions for expanding students’ horizons. Thus, both groups of receivers of education: those who are into arts and those who only get acquainted with art […]

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Connexin channels and hemichannels are modulated differently by charge reversal at residues forming the intracellular pocket

Members of the β-subfamily of connexins contain an intracellular pocket surrounded by amino acid residues from the four transmembrane helices. The presence of this pocket has not previously been investigated i...

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IDH1 mutation produces R-2-hydroxyglutarate (R-2HG) and induces mir-182-5p expression to regulate cell cycle and tumor formation in glioma

Mutations in isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 and 2 ( IDH1 and IDH2 ), are present in most gliomas. IDH1 mutation is an important prognostic marker in glioma. However, its regulatory mechanism in glioma remains incomplet...

Therapeutic potential of oleic acid supplementation in myotonic dystrophy muscle cell models

We recently reported that upregulation of Musashi 2 (MSI2) protein in the rare neuromuscular disease myotonic dystrophy type 1 contributes to the hyperactivation of the muscle catabolic processes autophagy and...

Dorsal root ganglion-derived exosomes deteriorate neuropathic pain by activating microglia via the microRNA-16-5p/HECTD1/HSP90 axis

The activated microglia have been reported as pillar factors in neuropathic pain (NP) pathology, but the molecules driving pain-inducible microglial activation require further exploration. In this study, we in...

MicroRNA-721 regulates gluconeogenesis via KDM2A-mediated epigenetic modulation in diet-induced insulin resistance in C57BL/6J mice

Aberrant gluconeogenesis is considered among primary drivers of hyperglycemia under insulin resistant conditions, with multiple studies pointing towards epigenetic dysregulation. Here we examine the role of mi...

Combined transcriptomics and proteomics unveil the impact of vitamin C in modulating specific protein abundance in the mouse liver

Vitamin C (ascorbate) is a water-soluble antioxidant and an important cofactor for various biosynthetic and regulatory enzymes. Mice can synthesize vitamin C thanks to the key enzyme gulonolactone oxidase (Gul...

Novel role of LLGL2 silencing in autophagy: reversing epithelial-mesenchymal transition in prostate cancer

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a major urological disease that is associated with significant morbidity and mortality in men. LLGL2 is the mammalian homolog of Lgl. It acts as a tumor suppressor in breast and hepati...

Rapid development and mass production of SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing chicken egg yolk antibodies with protective efficacy in hamsters

Despite the record speed of developing vaccines and therapeutics against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it is not a given that such success can be secured in future pandemics. In addition, COVID-19 vaccination and appl...

High-fat diet, microbiome-gut-brain axis signaling, and anxiety-like behavior in male rats

Obesity, associated with the intake of a high-fat diet (HFD), and anxiety are common among those living in modern urban societies. Recent studies suggest a role of microbiome-gut-brain axis signaling, includin...

General regulatory factors exert differential effects on nucleosome sliding activity of the ISW1a complex

Chromatin dynamics is deeply involved in processes that require access to DNA, such as transcriptional regulation. Among the factors involved in chromatin dynamics at gene regulatory regions are general regula...

Establishment of primary prostate epithelial and tumorigenic cell lines using a non-viral immortalization approach

Research on prostate cancer is mostly performed using cell lines derived from metastatic disease, not reflecting stages of tumor initiation or early progression. Establishment of cancer cell lines derived from...

The effect of diabetes mellitus on differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells into insulin-producing cells

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a global epidemic with increasing incidences. DM is a metabolic disease associated with chronic hyperglycemia. Aside from conventional treatments, there is no clinically approved cure...

Control of astrocytic Ca 2+ signaling by nitric oxide-dependent S-nitrosylation of Ca 2+ homeostasis modulator 1 channels

Astrocytes Ca 2+ signaling play a central role in the modulation of neuronal function. Activation of metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluR) by glutamate released during an increase in synaptic activity triggers ...

Increased levels and activation of the IL-17 receptor in microglia contribute to enhanced neuroinflammation in cerebellum of hyperammonemic rats

Patients with liver cirrhosis may show minimal hepatic encephalopathy (MHE) with mild cognitive impairment and motor incoordination. Rats with chronic hyperammonemia reproduce these alterations. Motor incoordi...

Identification and expression analysis of two steamer-like retrotransposons in the Chilean blue mussel ( Mytilus chilensis )

Disseminated neoplasia (DN) is a proliferative cell disorder of the circulatory system of bivalve mollusks. The disease is transmitted between individuals and can also be induced by external chemical agents su...

Noncoding RNAs in skeletal development and disorders

Protein-encoding genes only constitute less than 2% of total human genomic sequences, and 98% of genetic information was previously referred to as “junk DNA”. Meanwhile, non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) consist of app...

Cx43 hemichannels and panx1 channels contribute to ethanol-induced astrocyte dysfunction and damage

Alcohol, a widely abused drug, significantly diminishes life quality, causing chronic diseases and psychiatric issues, with severe health, societal, and economic repercussions. Previously, we demonstrated that...

Galectins in epithelial-mesenchymal transition: roles and mechanisms contributing to tissue repair, fibrosis and cancer metastasis

Galectins are soluble glycan-binding proteins that interact with a wide range of glycoproteins and glycolipids and modulate a broad spectrum of physiological and pathological processes. The expression and subc...

Glutaminolysis regulates endometrial fibrosis in intrauterine adhesion via modulating mitochondrial function

Endometrial fibrosis, a significant characteristic of intrauterine adhesion (IUA), is caused by the excessive differentiation and activation of endometrial stromal cells (ESCs). Glutaminolysis is the metabolic...

The long-chain flavodoxin FldX1 improves the biodegradation of 4-hydroxyphenylacetate and 3-hydroxyphenylacetate and counteracts the oxidative stress associated to aromatic catabolism in Paraburkholderia xenovorans

Bacterial aromatic degradation may cause oxidative stress. The long-chain flavodoxin FldX1 of Paraburkholderia xenovorans LB400 counteracts reactive oxygen species (ROS). The aim of this study was to evaluate the...

MicroRNA-148b secreted by bovine oviductal extracellular vesicles enhance embryo quality through BPM/TGF-beta pathway

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their cargoes, including MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play a crucial role in cell-to-cell communication. We previously demonstrated the upregulation of bta-mir-148b in EVs from oviductal...

YME1L-mediated mitophagy protects renal tubular cells against cellular senescence under diabetic conditions

The senescence of renal tubular epithelial cells (RTECs) is crucial in the progression of diabetic kidney disease (DKD). Accumulating evidence suggests a close association between insufficient mitophagy and RT...

Effects of latroeggtoxin-VI on dopamine and α-synuclein in PC12 cells and the implications for Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by death of dopaminergic neurons leading to dopamine deficiency, excessive α-synuclein facilitating Lewy body formation, etc. Latroeggtoxin-VI (LETX-VI), a proteinaceo...

Glial-restricted progenitor cells: a cure for diseased brain?

The central nervous system (CNS) is home to neuronal and glial cells. Traditionally, glia was disregarded as just the structural support across the brain and spinal cord, in striking contrast to neurons, alway...

Carbapenem-resistant hypervirulent ST23 Klebsiella pneumoniae with a highly transmissible dual-carbapenemase plasmid in Chile

The convergence of hypervirulence and carbapenem resistance in the bacterial pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae represents a critical global health concern. Hypervirulent K. pneumoniae (hvKp) strains, frequently from...

Endometrial mesenchymal stromal/stem cells improve regeneration of injured endometrium in mice

The monthly regeneration of human endometrial tissue is maintained by the presence of human endometrial mesenchymal stromal/stem cells (eMSC), a cell population co-expressing the perivascular markers CD140b an...

Embryo development is impaired by sperm mitochondrial-derived ROS

Basal energetic metabolism in sperm, particularly oxidative phosphorylation, is known to condition not only their oocyte fertilising ability, but also the subsequent embryo development. While the molecular pat...

Fibroblasts inhibit osteogenesis by regulating nuclear-cytoplasmic shuttling of YAP in mesenchymal stem cells and secreting DKK1

Fibrous scars frequently form at the sites of bone nonunion when attempts to repair bone fractures have failed. However, the detailed mechanism by which fibroblasts, which are the main components of fibrous sc...

MSC-derived exosomes protect auditory hair cells from neomycin-induced damage via autophagy regulation

Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) poses a major threat to both physical and mental health; however, there is still a lack of effective drugs to treat the disease. Recently, novel biological therapies, such as ...

Alpha-synuclein dynamics bridge Type-I Interferon response and SARS-CoV-2 replication in peripheral cells

Increasing evidence suggests a double-faceted role of alpha-synuclein (α-syn) following infection by a variety of viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. Although α-syn accumulation is known to contribute to cell toxic...

Lactadherin immunoblockade in small extracellular vesicles inhibits sEV-mediated increase of pro-metastatic capacities

Tumor-derived small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) can promote tumorigenic and metastatic capacities in less aggressive recipient cells mainly through the biomolecules in their cargo. However, despite recent ad...

Integration of ATAC-seq and RNA-seq identifies MX1-mediated AP-1 transcriptional regulation as a therapeutic target for Down syndrome

Growing evidence has suggested that Type I Interferon (I-IFN) plays a potential role in the pathogenesis of Down Syndrome (DS). This work investigates the underlying function of MX1, an effector gene of I-IFN,...

The novel roles of YULINK in the migration, proliferation and glycolysis of pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells: implications for pulmonary arterial hypertension

Abnormal remodeling of the pulmonary vasculature, characterized by the proliferation and migration of pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells (PASMCs) along with dysregulated glycolysis, is a pathognomonic feat...

Electroacupuncture promotes neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus and improves pattern separation in an early Alzheimer's disease mouse model

Impaired pattern separation occurs in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG) neurogenesis participates in pattern separation. Here, we investigated whether spatial memo...

Role of SYVN1 in the control of airway remodeling in asthma protection by promoting SIRT2 ubiquitination and degradation

Asthma is a heterogenous disease that characterized by airway remodeling. SYVN1 (Synoviolin 1) acts as an E3 ligase to mediate the suppression of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress through ubiquitination and de...

Advances towards the use of gastrointestinal tumor patient-derived organoids as a therapeutic decision-making tool

In December 2022 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed the requirement that drugs in development must undergo animal testing before clinical evaluation, a declaration that now demands the establish...

Melatonin alleviates pyroptosis by regulating the SIRT3/FOXO3α/ROS axis and interacting with apoptosis in Atherosclerosis progression

Atherosclerosis (AS), a significant contributor to cardiovascular disease (CVD), is steadily rising with the aging of the global population. Pyroptosis and apoptosis, both caspase-mediated cell death mechanism...

Prenatal ethanol exposure and changes in fetal neuroendocrine metabolic programming

Prenatal ethanol exposure (PEE) (mainly through maternal alcohol consumption) has become widespread. However, studies suggest that it can cause intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR) and multi-organ developmen...

Autologous non-invasively derived stem cells mitochondria transfer shows therapeutic advantages in human embryo quality rescue

The decline in the quantity and quality of mitochondria are closely associated with infertility, particularly in advanced maternal age. Transferring autologous mitochondria into the oocytes of infertile female...

Development of synthetic modulator enabling long-term propagation and neurogenesis of human embryonic stem cell-derived neural progenitor cells

Neural progenitor cells (NPCs) are essential for in vitro drug screening and cell-based therapies for brain-related disorders, necessitating well-defined and reproducible culture systems. Current strategies em...

Heat-responsive microRNAs participate in regulating the pollen fertility stability of CMS-D2 restorer line under high-temperature stress

Anther development and pollen fertility of cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) conditioned by Gossypium harknessii cytoplasm (CMS-D2) restorer lines are susceptible to continuous high-temperature (HT) stress in sum...

Chemogenetic inhibition of NTS astrocytes normalizes cardiac autonomic control and ameliorate hypertension during chronic intermittent hypoxia

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is characterized by recurrent episodes of chronic intermittent hypoxia (CIH), which has been linked to the development of sympathoexcitation and hypertension. Furthermore, it has ...

SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S1 activates Cx43 hemichannels and disturbs intracellular Ca 2+ dynamics

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). An aspect of high uncertainty is whether the SARS-CoV-2 per se or the systemic inflammation ...

The effect of zofenopril on the cardiovascular system of spontaneously hypertensive rats treated with the ACE2 inhibitor MLN-4760

Angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) plays a crucial role in the infection cycle of SARS-CoV-2 responsible for formation of COVID-19 pandemic. In the cardiovascular system, the virus enters the cells by bind...

Two murine models of sepsis: immunopathological differences between the sexes—possible role of TGFβ1 in female resistance to endotoxemia

Endotoxic shock (ExSh) and cecal ligature and puncture (CLP) are models that induce sepsis. In this work, we investigated early immunologic and histopathologic changes induced by ExSh or CLP models in female a...

An intracellular, non-oxidative factor activates in vitro chromatin fragmentation in pig sperm

In vitro incubation of epididymal and vas deferens sperm with Mn 2+ induces Sperm Chromatin Fragmentation (SCF), a mechanism that causes double-stranded breaks in toroid-linker regions (TLRs). Whether this mechani...

Focal ischemic stroke modifies microglia-derived exosomal miRNAs: potential role of mir-212-5p in neuronal protection and functional recovery

Ischemic stroke is a severe type of stroke with high disability and mortality rates. In recent years, microglial exosome-derived miRNAs have been shown to be promising candidates for the treatment of ischemic ...

S -Nitrosylation in endothelial cells contributes to tumor cell adhesion and extravasation during breast cancer metastasis

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Identifying pyroptosis- and inflammation-related genes in intracranial aneurysms based on bioinformatics analysis

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Drosophila Atlastin regulates synaptic vesicle mobilization independent of bone morphogenetic protein signaling

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) contacts endosomes in all parts of a motor neuron, including the axon and presynaptic terminal, to move structural proteins, proteins that send signals, and lipids over long dist...

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Biological Research

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200 Biology Research Topics For High School

Research papers are an integral part of high school. A detailed research paper is required in most of the subjects, and one just cannot back out, as this is a part of their curriculum. However, what is even more laborious than writing the whole research paper? Finding a good topic!

The same goes for biology. Although there are plenty of topics out there that a student can write about, choosing a relevant topic is often a taxing job since they may need to brainstorm various factors. However, it can be disentangled with clarity and appropriate counsel.

While this subject deals with various areas like cells, animals, plants, and human anatomy; in this post, we would appraise you with 200 biology research topics handpicked for aspiring high schoolers, to make their task easier.

Biology Research Topics- Finding the Right one

Choosing the right topic can be a long expedition. However, it can be effortless when students are clear about their requirements personally and academically. To discern the same, it can be a fair idea to look into some crucial attributes that can lead a high schooler towards a desired biology research topic.

Know your niche

Learners often have one or more notions that they feel enticing to learn and travel with. For instance, a student may like to learn and work in cell biology, while another may love studying more about genetics. Knowing the niche in which they can excel can make their topic selection facile.

Stick to one Narrow topic

After comprehending the choice of the niche, the scholar may need to narrow down to one topic which is intriguing and manageable at the same time. Evidently, “Study of Mitochondria and its benefits ” is a better choice than “Cell biology”. Choosing a righteous narrow topic may mitigate the constraints like taxing research and report length later.

Consult mentors and Peers

Instructors are always available to answer the queries of pupils. Students can take their inputs to add strength to their research topics. Mentors not only assist to choose the right topic but also can advise a few changes in the choice to make it finer. Say, a student has chosen “Study of DNA”, the mentor can suggest modifying it to ”Role of DNA in Curing Diseases”. Brainstorming sessions with peers may also ameliorate the topic decision

Ensure the School Regulations

High school research is often guided by some crucial regulations to stipulate students work efficiently. Students may need to choose a topic somehow related to the academic syllabus. Further, they may be stimulated to address burning issues to create awareness. Adhering to the guidelines can mitigate the need for rectifications later.

200 Biology Research Topics- To Start With Right Away

High School biology has several sections to choose from, which may make it taxing for students to resolute on one choice. Here is a sizable list of 201 biology research topics for high schoolers which they can start instantly:

Cell Biology

Animal cell and its structure
Functions of Cells
Mitochondria- the PowerHouse of cell
Functions of an RBC- How does it transfer Oxygen?
Functions of a WBC- How does it retain immunity?
Components of Plant Cell
Plant Cell Vs. Animal Cell
Cell Division
Mitosis Vs. Meiosis
Bacteria- How is it different from cells?
Cell structure and antibiotic Resistance
What are cancer cells? Are they Dangerous?
Mushrooms and Molds- A brief Study of Fungi
Curing Cancer Cells
Stem Cells- A brief Study
Embryonic vs Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells
Adults vs Induced Pluripotent stem Cells
The Build of Human DNA
Components of DNA
Chromosomes- A brief Study
Double Helix Structure of DNA
Singled celled Organisms and their DNA
Bacteria and its DNA
X and Y chromosomes
Genetic INformation in DNA
DNA modification- Its application in medicine
Cancer and DNA modification
DNA of dinosaurs
Do plants have DNA?

Molecular Biology

Gene- A Brief History
Components of Gene
Drugs for Humans
Vaccine vs Drugs
A brief study of Gregor Mendel
Dominant vs recessive genes
Widow’s peak illustration of Genes
What is mutation?
Hormones and their functions
Artificial hormones for animals
PCR tests for analyzing DNA
Structure of a Molecule
Structure of prion
DNA transcription-Its applications
Central Dogma
Heredity and traits

NeuroBiology

Human Nervous System- A brief description
Structure and components of neurons.
Neurons vs Animal cell
A brief study of electric pulses in the human brain
Altering reaction speed in the brain
Alzheimer’s disease- its study in genetics
Neurobiological Degeneration- does it have a cure?
Brain injuries and cures
Spinal Cord Injuries and cures
Narcolepsy
A brief study of mental health with neurobiology
Various emotions and their neural pulses
A brief study of the human neurological system

Genetics

A brief study of ancient cloning techniques
Reasons behind Abortion. Is it ethical
Procedure of abortion
What is human cloning?
Side effects of Human Cloning
Goals of Human Cloning
Transplantation vs Human Cloning
Perfect child theory. Is it ethical?
Gene cloning- Removal of undesirable traits.
Genes and ethics
Gene therapy
Gene therapy vs Cloning
Curing Cancer with Gene therapy
Cons of Cloning

Environment and Ecology

A Brief Study of Charles Darwin
The Evolution Theory
Natural Selection- the complete study
Mutation- A brief study with examples
Adaptations in animals- Study with 5 examples
Divergent evolution
Convergent evolution
Parallel Evolution
Components of a sustainable environment
Environmental Friendly Practices
Role of Plastics in pollution
Alternatives for Plastic
Deforestation
Solutions for Deforestations
Ecological concerns
History of the Ozone layer
Change in ecology- A study of extinct animals
Effects of Fast Food factories
Reversing ecological changes
Climate changes and their effects
Global Warming
GreenHouse effect

Plants And Animals

A study of Endangered animals
Melatonin therapy
Benefits of growing plants in the home
A brief study of popular plant diseases
Effects of pesticides and herbicides
Immunity in plants
The Banana Pandemic
Weedy and Invasive Plants
Genetic analysis of plants
Medicinal plants- A brief study
Evolution in plants
Plants in Food production
Components of Photosynthesis
A brief study of Phytohormones
Antibiotics and phytocides
A detailed study of Stomata structure
Grafting techniques
Roots and stem modification
Real-life examples of taxonomy
Study of sweet potato Virus
Classifications of animals
Evolution of marine life
Prehistoric aquatic life- study of enormous creatures
Evolution of land-based life
Zoos and petting- are they ethical?
Drug testing on animals
A brief study of cows and their benefits on Humans
Food chain and classification
Vegans vs carnivores
Resistance in animals
Behavioral changes in animals due to evolution
A brief study of intelligence in animals
Migration of birds- a brief study.
Study of extinct species and bringing back them
Types of dinosaurs
Male pregnancy in animals

Marine Biology

Oil spilling in the ocean- strategies to mitigate
Ocean Acidification and its effects
Evolution in aquatic animals
Camouflage mechanism
Petting marine species
Study on Ultrasonic communication in whales
Role of marine shows and debate on its ethics
Are mermaids real?
A study of immortal marine species
Plankton and its medicinal uses
Underwater ecologies
Freshwater And Seawater
A brief study of coral reefs
Medicinal values of coral reef plants
Tectonic plates and underwater earthquakes

Cardiovascular

Heart Rhythm and Arrhythmias
Preventive Cardiology
Hypertension
InterventionalCardiology
Heart Failure (Myocardial Biology)
Heart Disease in various age groups
Signs, symptoms and first aid for Heart Disease.
A study of ECG and other apparatus

Hormone Biology

Pregnancy and hormonal changes
Bipolar Disorder
Endocrine and related diseases
MEntal health in different genders.
Stress and immunity

Reproductive System

Cervical Cancer and its cure
A brief study of puberty
Contraception
Infertility
Test tube babies
The concept of surrogacy
Tubectomy and vasectomy
Male Reproductive complications and their cures
Female reproductive complications and their cure

Digestive System

Gastrointestinal tract- a brief study
Components of Digestive systems
A brief study of stomach and liver
Functions of intestines

Skeletal System

The function of the skeletal system
Type of bones
Functions of Sesamoid bones
Foods for healthy bones
A brief study of Spinal Cord

Excretory System

The detailed study on Kidney and its Function
Gross Anatomy of the Urinary System
Reasons for Renal Calculi (Kidney Stones) and cures

Miscellaneous

Coordination between muscular system and skeletal system
Benefits of ecotourism
Extinction of bees- A brief study
The green revolution
US Grain economy
Agricultural practices for more yield
World trade of food
A brief study of Covid 19
Renewable energies and their effect on plants
Bacteria and depression
Genes and neuron functions
Robotic surgeries- the study of the future.
Benefits of organic farming
Study of various components of flower and a fruit
Diet and obesity
Various components of Brain
Diabetes and its cure
CRISPR and Genetic Engineering
A brief on Cell tissue engineering

Having a large number of alternatives often creates incertitude. The topics we put forward are all worth considering. Determining your area of interest can make your choice facile. For instance, if you feel genetics enticing, prefer choosing relevant topics. You may consider consulting researchers, faculty and pertinent professionals to add muscle to your research. Review our picks to see if any of those can fit your choice in making a credible research paper.

Sananda Bhattacharya, Chief Editor of TheHighSchooler, is dedicated to enhancing operations and growth. With degrees in Literature and Asian Studies from Presidency University, Kolkata, she leverages her educational and innovative background to shape TheHighSchooler into a pivotal resource hub. Providing valuable insights, practical activities, and guidance on school life, graduation, scholarships, and more, Sananda’s leadership enriches the journey of high school students.

Explore a plethora of invaluable resources and insights tailored for high schoolers at TheHighSchooler, under the guidance of Sananda Bhattacharya’s expertise. You can follow her on Linkedin

Assessing the evolution of research topics in a biological field using plant science as an example

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America, Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America, DOE-Great Lake Bioenergy Research Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America

Shin-Han Shiu,
Melissa D. Lehti-Shiu

Published: May 23, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612
Peer Review
Reader Comments

Scientific advances due to conceptual or technological innovations can be revealed by examining how research topics have evolved. But such topical evolution is difficult to uncover and quantify because of the large body of literature and the need for expert knowledge in a wide range of areas in a field. Using plant biology as an example, we used machine learning and language models to classify plant science citations into topics representing interconnected, evolving subfields. The changes in prevalence of topical records over the last 50 years reflect shifts in major research trends and recent radiation of new topics, as well as turnover of model species and vastly different plant science research trajectories among countries. Our approaches readily summarize the topical diversity and evolution of a scientific field with hundreds of thousands of relevant papers, and they can be applied broadly to other fields.

Citation: Shiu S-H, Lehti-Shiu MD (2024) Assessing the evolution of research topics in a biological field using plant science as an example. PLoS Biol 22(5): e3002612. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612

Academic Editor: Ulrich Dirnagl, Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin, GERMANY

Received: October 16, 2023; Accepted: April 4, 2024; Published: May 23, 2024

Copyright: © 2024 Shiu, Lehti-Shiu. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The plant science corpus data are available through Zenodo ( https://zenodo.org/records/10022686 ). The codes for the entire project are available through GitHub ( https://github.com/ShiuLab/plant_sci_hist ) and Zenodo ( https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10894387 ).

Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (IOS-2107215 and MCB-2210431 to MDL and SHS; DGE-1828149 and IOS-2218206 to SHS), Department of Energy grant Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (DE-SC0018409 to SHS). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Abbreviations: BERT, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers; br, brassinosteroid; ccTLD, country code Top Level Domain; c-Tf-Idf, class-based Tf-Idf; ChatGPT, Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer; ga, gibberellic acid; LOWESS, locally weighted scatterplot smoothing; MeSH, Medical Subject Heading; SHAP, SHapley Additive exPlanations; SJR, SCImago Journal Rank; Tf-Idf, Term frequency-Inverse document frequency; UMAP, Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection

Introduction

The explosive growth of scientific data in recent years has been accompanied by a rapidly increasing volume of literature. These records represent a major component of our scientific knowledge and embody the history of conceptual and technological advances in various fields over time. Our ability to wade through these records is important for identifying relevant literature for specific topics, a crucial practice of any scientific pursuit [ 1 ]. Classifying the large body of literature into topics can provide a useful means to identify relevant literature. In addition, these topics offer an opportunity to assess how scientific fields have evolved and when major shifts in took place. However, such classification is challenging because the relevant articles in any topic or domain can number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, and the literature is in the form of natural language, which takes substantial effort and expertise to process [ 2 , 3 ]. In addition, even if one could digest all literature in a field, it would still be difficult to quantify such knowledge.

In the last several years, there has been a quantum leap in natural language processing approaches due to the feasibility of building complex deep learning models with highly flexible architectures [ 4 , 5 ]. The development of large language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT; [ 6 ]) and Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer (ChatGPT; [ 7 ]) has enabled the analysis, generation, and modeling of natural language texts in a wide range of applications. The success of these applications is, in large part, due to the feasibility of considering how the same words are used in different contexts when modeling natural language [ 6 ]. One such application is topic modeling, the practice of establishing statistical models of semantic structures underlying a document collection. Topic modeling has been proposed for identifying scientific hot topics over time [ 1 ], for example, in synthetic biology [ 8 ], and it has also been applied to, for example, automatically identify topical scenes in images [ 9 ] and social network topics [ 10 ], discover gene programs highly correlated with cancer prognosis [ 11 ], capture “chromatin topics” that define cell-type differences [ 12 ], and investigate relationships between genetic variants and disease risk [ 13 ]. Here, we use topic modeling to ask how research topics in a scientific field have evolved and what major changes in the research trends have taken place, using plant science as an example.

Plant science corpora allow classification of major research topics

Plant science, broadly defined, is the study of photosynthetic species, their interactions with biotic/abiotic environments, and their applications. For modeling plant science topical evolution, we first identified a collection of plant science documents (i.e., corpus) using a text classification approach. To this end, we first collected over 30 million PubMed records and narrowed down candidate plant science records by searching for those with plant-related terms and taxon names (see Materials and methods ). Because there remained a substantial number of false positives (i.e., biomedical records mentioning plants in passing), a set of positive plant science examples from the 17 plant science journals with the highest numbers of plant science publications covering a wide range of subfields and a set of negative examples from journals with few candidate plant science records were used to train 4 types of text classification models (see Materials and methods ). The best text classification model performed well (F1 = 0.96, F1 of a naïve model = 0.5, perfect model = 1) where the positive and negative examples were clearly separated from each other based on prediction probability of the hold-out testing dataset (false negative rate = 2.6%, false positive rate = 5.2%, S1A and S1B Fig ). The false prediction rate for documents from the 17 plant science journals annotated with the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) term “Plants” in NCBI was 11.7% (see Materials and methods ). The prediction probability distribution of positive instances with the MeSH term has an expected left-skew to lower values ( S1C Fig ) compared with the distributions of all positive instances ( S1A Fig ). Thus, this subset with the MeSH term is a skewed representation of articles from these 17 major plant science journals. To further benchmark the validity of the plant science records, we also conducted manual annotation of 100 records where the false positive and false negative rates were 14.6% and 10.6%, respectively (see Materials and methods ). Using 12 other plant science journals not included as positive examples as benchmarks, the false negative rate was 9.9% (see Materials and methods ). Considering the range of false prediction rate estimates with different benchmarks, we should emphasize that the model built with the top 17 plant science journals represents a substantial fraction of plant science publications but with biases. Applying the model to the candidate plant science record led to 421,658 positive predictions, hereafter referred to as “plant science records” ( S1D Fig and S1 Data ).

To better understand how the models classified plant science articles, we identified important terms from a more easily interpretable model (Term frequency-Inverse document frequency (Tf-Idf) model; F1 = 0.934) using Shapley Additive Explanations [ 14 ]; 136 terms contributed to predicting plant science records (e.g., Arabidopsis, xylem, seedling) and 138 terms contributed to non-plant science record predictions (e.g., patients, clinical, mice; Tf-Idf feature sheet, S1 Data ). Plant science records as well as PubMed articles grew exponentially from 1950 to 2020 ( Fig 1A ), highlighting the challenges of digesting the rapidly expanding literature. We used the plant science records to perform topic modeling, which consisted of 4 steps: representing each record as a BERT embedding, reducing dimensionality, clustering, and identifying the top terms by calculating class (i.e., topic)-based Tf-Idf (c-Tf-Idf; [ 15 ]). The c-Tf-Idf represents the frequency of a term in the context of how rare the term is to reduce the influence of common words. SciBERT [ 16 ] was the best model among those tested ( S2 Data ) and was used for building the final topic model, which classified 372,430 (88.3%) records into 90 topics defined by distinct combinations of terms ( S3 Data ). The topics contained 620 to 16,183 records and were named after the top 4 to 5 terms defining the topical areas ( Fig 1B and S3 Data ). For example, the top 5 terms representing the largest topic, topic 61 (16,183 records), are “qtl,” “resistance,” “wheat,” “markers,” and “traits,” which represent crop improvement studies using quantitative genetics.

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(A) Numbers of PubMed (magenta) and plant science (green) records between 1950 and 2020. (a, b, c) Coefficients of the exponential function, y = ae b . Data for the plot are in S1 Data . (B) Numbers of documents for the top 30 plant science topics. Each topic is designated by an index number (left) and the top 4–6 terms with the highest cTf-Idf values (right). Data for the plot are in S3 Data . (C) Two-dimensional representation of the relationships between plant science records generated by Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP, [ 17 ]) using SciBERT embeddings of plant science records. All topics panel: Different topics are assigned different colors. Outlier panel: UMAP representation of all records (gray) with outlier records in red. Blue dotted circles: areas with relatively high densities indicating topics that are below the threshold for inclusion in a topic. In the 8 UMAP representations on the right, records for example topics are in red and the remaining records in gray. Blue dotted circles indicate the relative position of topic 48.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.g001

Records with assigned topics clustered into distinct areas in a two-dimensional (2D) space ( Fig 1C , for all topics, see S4 Data ). The remaining 49,228 outlier records not assigned to any topic (11.7%, middle panel, Fig 1C ) have 3 potential sources. First, some outliers likely belong to unique topics but have fewer records than the threshold (>500, blue dotted circles, Fig 1C ). Second, some of the many outliers dispersed within the 2D space ( Fig 1C ) were not assigned to any single topic because they had relatively high prediction scores for multiple topics ( S2 Fig ). These likely represent studies across subdisciplines in plant science. Third, some outliers are likely interdisciplinary studies between plant science and other domains, such as chemistry, mathematics, and physics. Such connections can only be revealed if records from other domains are included in the analyses.

Topical clusters reveal closely related topics but with distinct key term usage

Related topics tend to be located close together in the 2D representation (e.g., topics 48 and 49, Fig 1C ). We further assessed intertopical relationships by determining the cosine similarities between topics using cTf-Idfs ( Figs 2A and S3 ). In this topic network, some topics are closely related and form topic clusters. For example, topics 25, 26, and 27 collectively represent a more general topic related to the field of plant development (cluster a , lower left in Fig 2A ). Other topic clusters represent studies of stress, ion transport, and heavy metals ( b ); photosynthesis, water, and UV-B ( c ); population and community biology (d); genomics, genetic mapping, and phylogenetics ( e , upper right); and enzyme biochemistry ( f , upper left in Fig 2A ).

(A) Graph depicting the degrees of similarity (edges) between topics (nodes). Between each topic pair, a cosine similarity value was calculated using the cTf-Idf values of all terms. A threshold similarity of 0.6 was applied to illustrate the most related topics. For the full matrix presented as a heatmap, see S4 Fig . The nodes are labeled with topic index numbers and the top 4–6 terms. The colors and width of the edges are defined based on cosine similarity. Example topic clusters are highlighted in yellow and labeled a through f (blue boxes). (B, C) Relationships between the cTf-Idf values (see S3 Data ) of the top terms for topics 26 and 27 (B) and for topics 25 and 27 (C) . Only terms with cTf-Idf ≥ 0.6 are labeled. Terms with cTf-Idf values beyond the x and y axis limit are indicated by pink arrows and cTf-Idf values. (D) The 2D representation in Fig 1C is partitioned into graphs for different years, and example plots for every 5-year period since 1975 are shown. Example topics discussed in the text are indicated. Blue arrows connect the areas occupied by records of example topics across time periods to indicate changes in document frequencies.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.g002

Topics differed in how well they were connected to each other, reflecting how general the research interests or needs are (see Materials and methods ). For example, topic 24 (stress mechanisms) is the most well connected with median cosine similarity = 0.36, potentially because researchers in many subfields consider aspects of plant stress even though it is not the focus. The least connected topics include topic 21 (clock biology, 0.12), which is surprising because of the importance of clocks in essentially all aspects of plant biology [ 18 ]. This may be attributed, in part, to the relatively recent attention in this area.

Examining topical relationships and the cTf-Idf values of terms also revealed how related topics differ. For example, topic 26 is closely related to topics 27 and 25 (cluster a on the lower left of Fig 2A ). Topics 26 and 27 both contain records of developmental process studies mainly in Arabidopsis ( Fig 2B ); however, topic 26 is focused on the impact of light, photoreceptors, and hormones such as gibberellic acids (ga) and brassinosteroids (br), whereas topic 27 is focused on flowering and floral development. Topic 25 is also focused on plant development but differs from topic 27 because it contains records of studies mainly focusing on signaling and auxin with less emphasis on Arabidopsis ( Fig 2C ). These examples also highlight the importance of using multiple top terms to represent the topics. The similarities in cTf-Idfs between topics were also useful for measuring the editorial scope (i.e., diverse, or narrow) of journals publishing plant science papers using a relative topic diversity measure (see Materials and methods ). For example, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , USA has the highest diversity, while Theoretical and Applied Genetics has the lowest ( S4 Fig ). One surprise is the relatively low diversity of American Journal of Botany , which focuses on plant ecology, systematics, development, and genetics. The low diversity is likely due to the relatively larger number of cellular and molecular science records in PubMed, consistent with the identification of relatively few topical areas relevant to studies at the organismal, population, community, and ecosystem levels.

Investigation of the relative prevalence of topics over time reveals topical succession

We next asked whether relationships between topics reflect chronological progression of certain subfields. To address this, we assessed how prevalent topics were over time using dynamic topic modeling [ 19 ]. As shown in Fig 2D , there is substantial fluctuation in where the records are in the 2D space over time. For example, topic 44 (light, leaves, co, synthesis, photosynthesis) is among the topics that existed in 1975 but has diminished gradually since. In 1985, topic 39 (Agrobacterium-based transformation) became dense enough to be visualized. Additional examples include topics 79 (soil heavy metals), 42 (differential expression), and 82 (bacterial community metagenomics), which became prominent in approximately 2005, 2010, and 2020, respectively ( Fig 2D ). In addition, animating the document occupancy in the 2D space over time revealed a broad change in patterns over time: Some initially dense areas became sparse over time and a large number of topics in areas previously only loosely occupied at the turn of the century increased over time ( S5 Data ).

While the 2D representations reveal substantial details on the evolution of topics, comparison over time is challenging because the number of plant science records has grown exponentially ( Fig 1A ). To address this, the records were divided into 50 chronological bins each with approximately 8,400 records to make cross-bin comparisons feasible ( S6 Data ). We should emphasize that, because of the way the chronological bins were split, the number of records for each topic in each bin should be treated as a normalized value relative to all other topics during the same period. Examining this relative prevalence of topics across bins revealed a clear pattern of topic succession over time (one topic evolved into another) and the presence of 5 topical categories ( Fig 3 ). The topics were categorized based on their locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOWESS) fits and ordered according to timing of peak frequency ( S7 and S8 Data , see Materials and methods ). In Fig 3 , the relative decrease in document frequency does not mean that research output in a topic is dwindling. Because each row in the heatmap is normalized based on the minimum and maximum values within each topic, there still can be substantial research output in terms of numbers of publications even when the relative frequency is near zero. Thus, a reduced relative frequency of a topic reflects only a below-average growth rate compared with other topical areas.

(A-E) A heat map of relative topic frequency over time reveals 5 topical categories: (A) stable, (B) early, (C) transitional, (D) sigmoidal, and (E) rising. The x axis denotes different time bins with each bin containing a similar number of documents to account for the exponential growth of plant science records over time. The sizes of all bins except the first are drawn to scale based on the beginning and end dates. The y axis lists different topics denoted by the label and top 4 to 5 terms. In each cell, the prevalence of a topic in a time bin is colored according to the min-max normalized cTf-Idf values for that topic. Light blue dotted lines delineate different decades. The arrows left of a subset of topic labels indicate example relationships between topics in topic clusters. Blue boxes with labels a–f indicate topic clusters, which are the same as those in Fig 2 . Connecting lines indicate successional trends. Yellow circles/lines 1 – 3: 3 major transition patterns. The original data are in S5 Data .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.g003

The first topical category is a stable category with 7 topics mostly established before the 1980s that have since remained stable in terms of prevalence in the plant science records (top of Fig 3A ). These topics represent long-standing plant science research foci, including studies of plant physiology (topics 4, 58, and 81), genetics (topic 61), and medicinal plants (topic 53). The second category contains 8 topics established before the 1980s that have mostly decreased in prevalence since (the early category, Fig 3B ). Two examples are physiological and morphological studies of hormone action (topic 45, the second in the early category) and the characterization of protein, DNA, and RNA (topic 18, the second to last). Unlike other early topics, topic 78 (paleobotany and plant evolution studies, the last topic in Fig 3B ) experienced a resurgence in the early 2000s due to the development of new approaches and databases and changes in research foci [ 20 ].

The 33 topics in the third, transitional category became prominent in the 1980s, 1990s, or even 2000s but have clearly decreased in prevalence ( Fig 3C ). In some cases, the early and the transitional topics became less prevalent because of topical succession—refocusing of earlier topics led to newer ones that either show no clear sign of decrease (the sigmoidal category, Fig 3D ) or continue to increase in prevalence (the rising category, Fig 3E ). Consistent with the notion of topical succession, topics within each topic cluster ( Fig 2 ) were found across topic categories and/or were prominent at different time periods (indicated by colored lines linking topics, Fig 3 ). One example is topics in topic cluster b (connected with light green lines and arrows, compare Figs 2 and 3 ); the study of cation transport (topic 47, the third in the transitional category), prominent in the 1980s and early 1990s, is connected to 5 other topics, namely, another transitional topic 29 (cation channels and their expression) peaking in the 2000s and early 2010s, sigmoidal topics 24 and 28 (stress response, tolerance mechanisms) and 30 (heavy metal transport), which rose to prominence in mid-2000s, and the rising topic 42 (stress transcriptomic studies), which increased in prevalence in the mid-2010s.

The rise and fall of topics can be due to a combination of technological or conceptual breakthroughs, maturity of the field, funding constraints, or publicity. The study of transposable elements (topic 62) illustrates the effect of publicity; the rise in this field coincided with Barbara McClintock’s 1983 Nobel Prize but not with the publication of her studies in the 1950s [ 21 ]. The reduced prevalence in early 2000 likely occurred in part because analysis of transposons became a central component of genome sequencing and annotation studies, rather than dedicated studies. In addition, this example indicates that our approaches, while capable of capturing topical trends, cannot be used to directly infer major papers leading to the growth of a topic.

Three major topical transition patterns signify shifts in research trends

Beyond the succession of specific topics, 3 major transitions in the dynamic topic graph should be emphasized: (1) the relative decreasing trend of early topics in the late 1970s and early 1980s; (2) the rise of transitional topics in late 1980s; and (3) the relative decreasing trend of transitional topics in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which coincided with a radiation of sigmoidal and rising topics (yellow circles, Fig 3 ). The large numbers of topics involved in these transitions suggest major shifts in plant science research. In transition 1, early topics decreased in relative prevalence in the late 1970s to early 1980s, which coincided with the rise of transitional topics over the following decades (circle 1, Fig 3 ). For example, there was a shift from the study of purified proteins such as enzymes (early topic 48, S5A Fig ) to molecular genetic dissection of genes, proteins, and RNA (transitional topic 35, S5B Fig ) enabled by the wider adoption of recombinant DNA and molecular cloning technologies in late 1970s [ 22 ]. Transition 2 (circle 2, Fig 3 ) can be explained by the following breakthroughs in the late 1980s: better approaches to create transgenic plants and insertional mutants [ 23 ], more efficient creation of mutant plant libraries through chemical mutagenesis (e.g., [ 24 ]), and availability of gene reporter systems such as β-glucuronidase [ 25 ]. Because of these breakthroughs, molecular genetics studies shifted away from understanding the basic machinery to understanding the molecular underpinnings of specific processes, such as molecular mechanisms of flower and meristem development and the action of hormones such as auxin (topic 27, S5C Fig ); this type of research was discussed as a future trend in 1988 [ 26 ] and remains prevalent to this date. Another example is gene silencing (topic 12), which became a focal area of study along with the widespread use of transgenic plants [ 27 ].

Transition 3 is the most drastic: A large number of transitional, sigmoidal, and rising topics became prevalent nearly simultaneously at the turn of the century (circle 3, Fig 3 ). This period also coincides with a rapid increase in plant science citations ( Fig 1A ). The most notable breakthroughs included the availability of the first plant genome in 2000 [ 28 ], increasing ease and reduced cost of high-throughput sequencing [ 29 ], development of new mass spectrometry–based platforms for analyzing proteins [ 30 ], and advancements in microscopic and optical imaging approaches [ 31 ]. Advances in genomics and omics technology also led to an increase in stress transcriptomics studies (42, S5D Fig ) as well as studies in many other topics such as epigenetics (topic 11), noncoding RNA analysis (13), genomics and phylogenetics (80), breeding (41), genome sequencing and assembly (60), gene family analysis (23), and metagenomics (82 and 55).

In addition to the 3 major transitions across all topics, there were also transitions within topics revealed by examining the top terms for different time bins (heatmaps, S5 Fig ). Taken together, these observations demonstrate that knowledge about topical evolution can be readily revealed through topic modeling. Such knowledge is typically only available to experts in specific areas and is difficult to summarize manually, as no researcher has a command of the entire plant science literature.

Analysis of taxa studied reveals changes in research trends

Changes in research trends can also be illustrated by examining changes in the taxa being studied over time ( S9 Data ). There is a strong bias in the taxa studied, with the record dominated by research models and economically important taxa ( S6 Fig ). Flowering plants (Magnoliopsida) are found in 93% of records ( S6A Fig ), and the mustard family Brassicaceae dominates at the family level ( S6B Fig ) because the genus Arabidopsis contributes to 13% of plant science records ( Fig 4A ). When examining the prevalence of taxa being studied over time, clear patterns of turnover emerged similar to topical succession ( Figs 4B , S6C, and S6D ; Materials and methods ). Given that Arabidopsis is mentioned in more publications than other species we analyzed, we further examined the trends for Arabidopsis publications. The increase in the normalized number (i.e., relative to the entire plant science corpus) of Arabidopsis records coincided with advocacy of its use as a model system in the late 1980s [ 32 ]. While it remains a major plant model, there has been a decrease in overall Arabidopsis publications relative to all other plant science publications since 2011 (blue line, normalized total, Fig 4C ). Because the same chronological bins, each with same numbers of records, from the topic-over-time analysis ( Fig 3 ) were used, the decrease here does not mean that there were fewer Arabidopsis publications—in fact, the number of Arabidopsis papers has remained steady since 2011. This decrease means that Arabidopsis-related publications represent a relatively smaller proportion of plant science records. Interestingly, this decrease took place much earlier (approximately 2005) and was steeper in the United States (red line, Fig 4C ) than in all countries combined (blue line, Fig 4C ).

(A) Percentage of records mentioning specific genera. (B) Change in the prevalence of genera in plant science records over time. (C) Changes in the normalized numbers of all records (blue) and records from the US (red) mentioning Arabidopsis over time. The lines are LOWESS fits with fraction parameter = 0.2. (D) Topical over (red) and under (blue) representation among 5 genera with the most plant science records. LLR: log 2 likelihood ratios of each topic in each genus. Gray: topic-species combination not significantly enriched at the 5% level based on enrichment p -values adjusted for multiple testing with the Benjamini–Hochberg method [ 33 ]. The data used for plotting are in S9 Data . The statistics for all topics are in S10 Data .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.g004

Assuming that the normalized number of publications reflects the relative intensity of research activities, one hypothesis for the relative decrease in focus on Arabidopsis is that advances in, for example, plant transformation, genetic manipulation, and genome research have allowed the adoption of more previously nonmodel taxa. Consistent with this, there was a precipitous increase in the number of genera being published in the mid-90s to early 2000s during which approaches for plant transgenics became established [ 34 ], but the number has remained steady since then ( S7A Fig ). The decrease in the proportion of Arabidopsis papers is also negatively correlated with the timing of an increase in the number of draft genomes ( S7B Fig and S9 Data ). It is plausible that genome availability for other species may have contributed to a shift away from Arabidopsis. Strikingly, when we analyzed US National Science Foundation records, we found that the numbers of funded grants mentioning Arabidopsis ( S7C Fig ) have risen and fallen in near perfect synchrony with the normalized number of Arabidopsis publication records (red line, Fig 4C ). This finding likely illustrates the impact of funding on Arabidopsis research.

By considering both taxa information and research topics, we can identify clear differences in the topical areas preferred by researchers using different plant taxa ( Fig 4D and S10 Data ). For example, studies of auxin/light signaling, the circadian clock, and flowering tend to be carried out in Arabidopsis, while quantitative genetic studies of disease resistance tend to be done in wheat and rice, glyphosate research in soybean, and RNA virus research in tobacco. Taken together, joint analyses of topics and species revealed additional details about changes in preferred models over time, and the preferred topical areas for different taxa.

Countries differ in their contributions to plant science and topical preference

We next investigated whether there were geographical differences in topical preference among countries by inferring country information from 330,187 records (see Materials and methods ). The 10 countries with the most records account for 73% of the total, with China and the US contributing to approximately 18% each ( Fig 5A ). The exponential growth in plant science records (green line, Fig 1A ) was in large part due to the rapid rise in annual record numbers in China and India ( Fig 5B ). When we examined the publication growth rates using the top 17 plant science journals, the general patterns remained the same ( S7D Fig ). On the other hand, the US, Japan, Germany, France, and Great Britain had slower rates of growth compared with all non-top 10 countries. The rapid increase in records from China and India was accompanied by a rapid increase in metrics measuring journal impact ( Figs 5C and S8 and S9 Data ). For example, using citation score ( Fig 5C , see Materials and methods ), we found that during a 22-year period China (dark green) and India (light green) rapidly approached the global average (y = 0, yellow), whereas some of the other top 10 countries, particularly the US (red) and Japan (yellow green), showed signs of decrease ( Fig 5C ). It remains to be determined whether these geographical trends reflect changes in priority, investment, and/or interest in plant science research.

(A) Numbers of plant science records for countries with the 10 highest numbers. (B) Percentage of all records from each of the top 10 countries from 1980 to 2020. (C) Difference in citation scores from 1999 to 2020 for the top 10 countries. (D) Shown for each country is the relationship between the citation scores averaged from 1999 to 2020 and the slope of linear fit with year as the predictive variable and citation score as the response variable. The countries with >400 records and with <10% missing impact values are included. Data used for plots (A–D) are in S11 Data . (E) Correlation in topic enrichment scores between the top 10 countries. PCC, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, positive in red, negative in blue. Yellow rectangle: countries with more similar topical preferences. (F) Enrichment scores (LLR, log likelihood ratio) of selected topics among the top 10 countries. Red: overrepresentation, blue: underrepresentation. Gray: topic-country combination that is not significantly enriched at the 5% level based on enrichment p -values adjusted for multiple testing with the Benjamini–Hochberg method (for all topics and plotting data, see S12 Data ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.g005

Interestingly, the relative growth/decline in citation scores over time (measured as the slope of linear fit of year versus citation score) was significantly and negatively correlated with average citation score ( Fig 5D ); i.e., countries with lower overall metrics tended to experience the strongest increase in citation scores over time. Thus, countries that did not originally have a strong influence on plant sciences now have increased impact. These patterns were also observed when using H-index or journal rank as metrics ( S8 Fig and S11 Data ) and were not due to increased publication volume, as the metrics were normalized against numbers of records from each country (see Materials and methods ). In addition, the fact that different metrics with different caveats and assumptions yielded consistent conclusions indicates the robustness of our observations. We hypothesize that this may be a consequence of the ease in scientific communication among geographically isolated research groups. It could also be because of the prevalence of online journals that are open access, which makes scientific information more readily accessible. Or it can be due to the increasing international collaboration. In any case, the causes for such regression toward the mean are not immediately clear and should be addressed in future studies.

We also assessed how the plant research foci of countries differ by comparing topical preference (i.e., the degree of enrichment of plant science records in different topics) between countries. For example, Italy and Spain cluster together (yellow rectangle, Fig 5E ) partly because of similar research focusing on allergens (topic 0) and mycotoxins (topic 54) and less emphasis on gene family (topic 23) and stress tolerance (topic 28) studies ( Fig 5F , for the fold enrichment and corrected p -values of all topics, see S12 Data ). There are substantial differences in topical focus between countries ( S9 Fig ). For example, research on new plant compounds associated with herbal medicine (topic 69) is a focus in China but not in the US, but the opposite is true for population genetics and evolution (topic 86) ( Fig 5F ). In addition to revealing how plant science research has evolved over time, topic modeling provides additional insights into differences in research foci among different countries, which are informative for science policy considerations.

In this study, topic modeling revealed clear transitions among research topics, which represent shifts in research trends in plant sciences. One limitation of our study is the bias in the PubMed-based corpus. The cellular, molecular, and physiological aspects of plant sciences are well represented, but there are many fewer records related to evolution, ecology, and systematics. Our use of titles/abstracts from the top 17 plant science journals as positive examples allowed us to identify papers we typically see in these journals, but this may have led to us missing “outlier” articles, which may be the most exciting. Another limitation is the need to assign only one topic to a record when a study is interdisciplinary and straddles multiple topics. Furthermore, a limited number of large, inherently heterogeneous topics were summarized to provide a more concise interpretation, which undoubtedly underrepresents the diversity of plant science research. Despite these limitations, dynamic topic modeling revealed changes in plant science research trends that coincide with major shifts in biological science. While we were interested in identifying conceptual advances, our approach can identify the trend but the underlying causes for such trends, particularly key records leading to the growth in certain topics, still need to be identified. It also remains to be determined which changes in research trends lead to paradigm shifts as defined by Kuhn [ 35 ].

The key terms defining the topics frequently describe various technologies (e.g., topic 38/39: transformation, 40: genome editing, 59: genetic markers, 65: mass spectrometry, 69: nuclear magnetic resonance) or are indicative of studies enabled through molecular genetics and omics technologies (e.g., topic 8/60: genome, 11: epigenetic modifications, 18: molecular biological studies of macromolecules, 13: small RNAs, 61: quantitative genetics, 82/84: metagenomics). Thus, this analysis highlights how technological innovation, particularly in the realm of omics, has contributed to a substantial number of research topics in the plant sciences, a finding that likely holds for other scientific disciplines. We also found that the pattern of topic evolution is similar to that of succession, where older topics have mostly decreased in relative prevalence but appear to have been superseded by newer ones. One example is the rise of transcriptome-related topics and the correlated, reduced focus on regulation at levels other than transcription. This raises the question of whether research driven by technology negatively impacts other areas of research where high-throughput studies remain challenging.

One observation on the overall trends in plant science research is the approximately 10-year cycle in major shifts. One hypothesis is related to not only scientific advances but also to the fashion-driven aspect of science. Nonetheless, given that there were only 3 major shifts and the sample size is small, it is difficult to speculate as to why they happened. By analyzing the country of origin, we found that China and India have been the 2 major contributors to the growth in the plant science records in the last 20 years. Our findings also show an equalizing trend in global plant science where countries without a strong plant science publication presence have had an increased impact over the last 20 years. In addition, we identified significant differences in research topics between countries reflecting potential differences in investment and priorities. Such information is important for discerning differences in research trends across countries and can be considered when making policy decisions about research directions.

Materials and methods

Collection and preprocessing of a candidate plant science corpus.

For reproducibility purposes, a random state value of 20220609 was used throughout the study. The PubMed baseline files containing citation information ( ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/baseline/ ) were downloaded on November 11, 2021. To narrow down the records to plant science-related citations, a candidate citation was identified as having, within the titles and/or abstracts, at least one of the following words: “plant,” “plants,” “botany,” “botanical,” “planta,” and “plantarum” (and their corresponding upper case and plural forms), or plant taxon identifiers from NCBI Taxonomy ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/taxonomy ) or USDA PLANTS Database ( https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/home ). Note the search terms used here have nothing to do with the values of the keyword field in PubMed records. The taxon identifiers include all taxon names including and at taxonomic levels below “Viridiplantae” till the genus level (species names not used). This led to 51,395 search terms. After looking for the search terms, qualified entries were removed if they were duplicated, lacked titles and/or abstracts, or were corrections, errata, or withdrawn articles. This left 1,385,417 citations, which were considered the candidate plant science corpus (i.e., a collection of texts). For further analysis, the title and abstract for each citation were combined into a single entry. Text was preprocessed by lowercasing, removing stop-words (i.e., common words), removing non-alphanumeric and non-white space characters (except Greek letters, dashes, and commas), and applying lemmatization (i.e., grouping inflected forms of a word as a single word) for comparison. Because lemmatization led to truncated scientific terms, it was not included in the final preprocessing pipeline.

Definition of positive/negative examples

Upon closer examination, a large number of false positives were identified in the candidate plant science records. To further narrow down citations with a plant science focus, text classification was used to distinguish plant science and non-plant science articles (see next section). For the classification task, a negative set (i.e., non-plant science citations) was defined as entries from 7,360 journals that appeared <20 times in the filtered data (total = 43,329, journal candidate count, S1 Data ). For the positive examples (i.e., true plant science citations), 43,329 plant science citations (positive examples) were sampled from 17 established plant science journals each with >2,000 entries in the filtered dataset: “Plant physiology,” “Frontiers in plant science,” “Planta,” “The Plant journal: for cell and molecular biology,” “Journal of experimental botany,” “Plant molecular biology,” “The New phytologist,” “The Plant cell,” “Phytochemistry,” “Plant & cell physiology,” “American journal of botany,” “Annals of botany,” “BMC plant biology,” “Tree physiology,” “Molecular plant-microbe interactions: MPMI,” “Plant biology,” and “Plant biotechnology journal” (journal candidate count, S1 Data ). Plant biotechnology journal was included, but only 1,894 records remained after removal of duplicates, articles with missing info, and/or withdrawn articles. The positive and negative sets were randomly split into training and testing subsets (4:1) while maintaining a 1:1 positive-to-negative ratio.

Text classification based on Tf and Tf-Idf

Instead of using the preprocessed text as features for building classification models directly, text embeddings (i.e., representations of texts in vectors) were used as features. These embeddings were generated using 4 approaches (model summary, S1 Data ): Term-frequency (Tf), Tf-Idf [ 36 ], Word2Vec [ 37 ], and BERT [ 6 ]. The Tf- and Tf-Idf-based features were generated with CountVectorizer and TfidfVectorizer, respectively, from Scikit-Learn [ 38 ]. Different maximum features (1e4 to 1e5) and n-gram ranges (uni-, bi-, and tri-grams) were tested. The features were selected based on the p- value of chi-squared tests testing whether a feature had a higher-than-expected value among the positive or negative classes. Four different p- value thresholds were tested for feature selection. The selected features were then used to retrain vectorizers with the preprocessed training texts to generate feature values for classification. The classification model used was XGBoost [ 39 ] with 5 combinations of the following hyperparameters tested during 5-fold stratified cross-validation: min_child_weight = (1, 5, 10), gamma = (0.5, 1, 1.5, 2.5), subsample = (0.6, 0.8, 1.0), colsample_bytree = (0.6, 0.8, 1.0), and max_depth = (3, 4, 5). The rest of the hyperparameters were held constant: learning_rate = 0.2, n_estimators = 600, objective = binary:logistic. RandomizedSearchCV from Scikit-Learn was used for hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation with scoring = F1-score.

Because the Tf-Idf model had a relatively high model performance and was relatively easy to interpret (terms are frequency-based, instead of embedding-based like those generated by Word2Vec and BERT), the Tf-Idf model was selected as input to SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP; [ 14 ]) to assess the importance of terms. Because the Tf-Idf model was based on XGBoost, a tree-based algorithm, the TreeExplainer module in SHAP was used to determine a SHAP value for each entry in the training dataset for each Tf-Idf feature. The SHAP value indicates the degree to which a feature positively or negatively affects the underlying prediction. The importance of a Tf-Idf feature was calculated as the average SHAP value of that feature among all instances. Because a Tf-Idf feature is generated based on a specific term, the importance of the Tf-Idf feature indicates the importance of the associated term.

Text classification based on Word2Vec

The preprocessed texts were first split into train, validation, and test subsets (8:1:1). The texts in each subset were converted to 3 n-gram lists: a unigram list obtained by splitting tokens based on the space character, or bi- and tri-gram lists built with Gensim [ 40 ]. Each n-gram list of the training subset was next used to fit a Skip-gram Word2Vec model with vector_size = 300, window = 8, min_count = (5, 10, or 20), sg = 1, and epochs = 30. The Word2Vec model was used to generate word embeddings for train, validate, and test subsets. In the meantime, a tokenizer was trained with train subset unigrams using Tensorflow [ 41 ] and used to tokenize texts in each subset and turn each token into indices to use as features for training text classification models. To ensure all citations had the same number of features (500), longer texts were truncated, and shorter ones were zero-padded. A deep learning model was used to train a text classifier with an input layer the same size as the feature number, an attention layer incorporating embedding information for each feature, 2 bidirectional Long-Short-Term-Memory layers (15 units each), a dense layer (64 units), and a final, output layer with 2 units. During training, adam, accuracy, and sparse_categorical_crossentropy were used as the optimizer, evaluation metric, and loss function, respectively. The training process lasted 30 epochs with early stopping if validation loss did not improve in 5 epochs. An F1 score was calculated for each n-gram list and min_count parameter combination to select the best model (model summary, S1 Data ).

Text classification based on BERT models

Two pretrained models were used for BERT-based classification: DistilBERT (Hugging face repository [ 42 ] model name and version: distilbert-base-uncased [ 43 ]) and SciBERT (allenai/scibert-scivocab-uncased [ 16 ]). In both cases, tokenizers were retrained with the training data. BERT-based models had the following architecture: the token indices (512 values for each token) and associated masked values as input layers, pretrained BERT layer (512 × 768) excluding outputs, a 1D pooling layer (768 units), a dense layer (64 units), and an output layer (2 units). The rest of the training parameters were the same as those for Word2Vec-based models, except training lasted for 20 epochs. Cross-validation F1-scores for all models were compared and used to select the best model for each feature extraction method, hyperparameter combination, and modeling algorithm or architecture (model summary, S1 Data ). The best model was the Word2Vec-based model (min_count = 20, window = 8, ngram = 3), which was applied to the candidate plant science corpus to identify a set of plant science citations for further analysis. The candidate plant science records predicted as being in the positive class (421,658) by the model were collectively referred to as the “plant science corpus.”

Plant science record classification

In PubMed, 1,384,718 citations containing “plant” or any plant taxon names (from the phylum to genus level) were considered candidate plant science citations. To further distinguish plant science citations from those in other fields, text classification models were trained using titles and abstracts of positive examples consisting of citations from 17 plant science journals, each with >2,000 entries in PubMed, and negative examples consisting of records from journals with fewer than 20 entries in the candidate set. Among 4 models tested the best model (built with Word2Vec embeddings) had a cross validation F1 of 0.964 (random guess F1 = 0.5, perfect model F1 = 1, S1 Data ). When testing the model using 17,330 testing set citations independent from the training set, the F1 remained high at 0.961.

We also conducted another analysis attempting to use the MeSH term “Plants” as a benchmark. Records with the MeSH term “Plants” also include pharmaceutical studies of plants and plant metabolites or immunological studies of plants as allergens in journals that are not generally considered plant science journals (e.g., Acta astronautica , International journal for parasitology , Journal of chromatography ) or journals from local scientific societies (e.g., Acta pharmaceutica Hungarica , Huan jing ke xue , Izvestiia Akademii nauk . Seriia biologicheskaia ). Because we explicitly labeled papers from such journals as negative examples, we focused on 4,004 records with the “Plants” MeSH term published in the 17 plant science journals that were used as positive instances and found that 88.3% were predicted as the positive class. Thus, based on the MeSH term, there is an 11.7% false prediction rate.

We also enlisted 5 plant science colleagues (3 advanced graduate students in plant biology and genetic/genome science graduate programs, 1 postdoctoral breeder/quantitative biologist, and 1 postdoctoral biochemist/geneticist) to annotate 100 randomly selected abstracts as a reviewer suggested. Each record was annotated by 2 colleagues. Among 85 entries where the annotations are consistent between annotators, 48 were annotated as negative but with 7 predicted as positive (false positive rate = 14.6%) and 37 were annotated as positive but with 4 predicted as negative (false negative rate = 10.8%). To further benchmark the performance of the text classification model, we identified another 12 journals that focus on plant science studies to use as benchmarks: Current opinion in plant biology (number of articles: 1,806), Trends in plant science (1,723), Functional plant biology (1,717), Molecular plant pathology (1,573), Molecular plant (1,141), Journal of integrative plant biology (1,092), Journal of plant research (1,032), Physiology and molecular biology of plants (830), Nature plants (538), The plant pathology journal (443). Annual review of plant biology (417), and The plant genome (321). Among the 12,611 candidate plant science records, 11,386 were predicted as positive. Thus, there is a 9.9% false negative rate.

Global topic modeling

BERTopic [ 15 ] was used for preliminary topic modeling with n-grams = (1,2) and with an embedding initially generated by DistilBERT, SciBERT, or BioBERT (dmis-lab/biobert-base-cased-v1.2; [ 44 ]). The embedding models converted preprocessed texts to embeddings. The topics generated based on the 3 embeddings were similar ( S2 Data ). However, SciBERT-, BioBERT-, and distilBERT-based embedding models had different numbers of outlier records (268,848, 293,790, and 323,876, respectively) with topic index = −1. In addition to generating the fewest outliers, the SciBERT-based model led to the highest number of topics. Therefore, SciBERT was chosen as the embedding model for the final round of topic modeling. Modeling consisted of 3 steps. First, document embeddings were generated with SentenceTransformer [ 45 ]. Second, a clustering model to aggregate documents into clusters using hdbscan [ 46 ] was initialized with min_cluster_size = 500, metric = euclidean, cluster_selection_method = eom, min_samples = 5. Third, the embedding and the initialized hdbscan model were used in BERTopic to model topics with neighbors = 10, nr_topics = 500, ngram_range = (1,2). Using these parameters, 90 topics were identified. The initial topic assignments were conservative, and 241,567 records were considered outliers (i.e., documents not assigned to any of the 90 topics). After assessing the prediction scores of all records generated from the fitted topic models, the 95-percentile score was 0.0155. This score was used as the threshold for assigning outliers to topics: If the maximum prediction score was above the threshold and this maximum score was for topic t , then the outlier was assigned to t . After the reassignment, 49,228 records remained outliers. To assess if some of the outliers were not assigned because they could be assigned to multiple topics, the prediction scores of the records were used to put records into 100 clusters using k- means. Each cluster was then assessed to determine if the outlier records in a cluster tended to have higher prediction scores across multiple topics ( S2 Fig ).

Topics that are most and least well connected to other topics

The most well-connected topics in the network include topic 24 (stress mechanisms, median cosine similarity = 0.36), topic 42 (genes, stress, and transcriptomes, 0.34), and topic 35 (molecular genetics, 0.32, all t test p -values < 1 × 10 −22 ). The least connected topics include topic 0 (allergen research, median cosine similarity = 0.12), topic 21 (clock biology, 0.12), topic 1 (tissue culture, 0.15), and topic 69 (identification of compounds with spectroscopic methods, 0.15; all t test p- values < 1 × 10 −24 ). Topics 0, 1, and 69 are specialized topics; it is surprising that topic 21 is not as well connected as explained in the main text.

Analysis of documents based on the topic model

Topical diversity among top journals with the most plant science records

Using a relative topic diversity measure (ranging from 0 to 10), we found that there was a wide range of topical diversity among 20 journals with the largest numbers of plant science records ( S3 Fig ). The 4 journals with the highest relative topical diversities are Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , USA (9.6), Scientific Reports (7.1), Plant Physiology (6.7), and PLOS ONE (6.4). The high diversities are consistent with the broad, editorial scopes of these journals. The 4 journals with the lowest diversities are American Journal of Botany (1.6), Oecologia (0.7), Plant Disease (0.7), and Theoretical and Applied Genetics (0.3), which reflects their discipline-specific focus and audience of classical botanists, ecologists, plant pathologists, and specific groups of geneticists.

Dynamic topic modeling

The codes for dynamic modeling were based on _topic_over_time.py in BERTopics and modified to allow additional outputs for debugging and graphing purposes. The plant science citations were binned into 50 subsets chronologically (for timestamps of bins, see S5 Data ). Because the numbers of documents increased exponentially over time, instead of dividing them based on equal-sized time intervals, which would result in fewer records at earlier time points and introduce bias, we divided them into time bins of similar size (approximately 8,400 documents). Thus, the earlier time subsets had larger time spans compared with later time subsets. If equal-size time intervals were used, the numbers of documents between the intervals would differ greatly; the earlier time points would have many fewer records, which may introduce bias. Prior to binning the subsets, the publication dates were converted to UNIX time (timestamp) in seconds; the plant science records start in 1917-11-1 (timestamp = −1646247600.0) and end in 2021-1-1 (timestamp = 1609477201). The starting dates and corresponding timestamps for the 50 subsets including the end date are in S6 Data . The input data included the preprocessed texts, topic assignments of records from global topic modeling, and the binned timestamps of records. Three additional parameters were set for topics_over_time, namely, nr_bin = 50 (number of bins), evolution_tuning = True, and global_tuning = False. The evolution_tuning parameter specified that averaged c-Tf-Idf values for a topic be calculated in neighboring time bins to reduce fluctuation in c-Tf-Idf values. The global_tuning parameter was set to False because of the possibility that some nonexisting terms could have a high c-Tf-Idf for a time bin simply because there was a high global c-Tf-Idf value for that term.

The binning strategy based on similar document numbers per bin allowed us to increase signal particularly for publications prior to the 90s. This strategy, however, may introduce more noise for bins with smaller time durations (i.e., more recent bins) because of publication frequencies (there can be seasonal differences in the number of papers published, biased toward, e.g., the beginning of the year or the beginning of a quarter). To address this, we examined the relative frequencies of each topic over time ( S7 Data ), but we found that recent time bins had similar variances in relative frequencies as other time bins. We also moderated the impact of variation using LOWESS (10% to 30% of the data points were used for fitting the trend lines) to determine topical trends for Fig 3 . Thus, the influence of the noise introduced via our binning strategy is expected to be minimal.

Topic categories and ordering

The topics were classified into 5 categories with contrasting trends: stable, early, transitional, sigmoidal, and rising. To define which category a topic belongs to, the frequency of documents over time bins for each topic was analyzed using 3 regression methods. We first tried 2 forecasting methods: recursive autoregressor (the ForecasterAutoreg class in the skforecast package) and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA implemented in the pmdarima package). In both cases, the forecasting results did not clearly follow the expected trend lines, likely due to the low numbers of data points (relative frequency values), which resulted in the need to extensively impute missing data. Thus, as a third approach, we sought to fit the trendlines with the data points using LOWESS (implemented in the statsmodels package) and applied additional criteria for assigning topics to categories. When fitting with LOWESS, 3 fraction parameters (frac, the fraction of the data used when estimating each y-value) were evaluated (0.1, 0.2, 0.3). While frac = 0.3 had the smallest errors for most topics, in situations where there were outliers, frac = 0.2 or 0.1 was chosen to minimize mean squared errors ( S7 Data ).

The topics were classified into 5 categories based on the slopes of the fitted line over time: (1) stable: topics with near 0 slopes over time; (2) early: topics with negative (<−0.5) slopes throughout (with the exception of topic 78, which declined early on but bounced back by the late 1990s); (3) transitional: early positive (>0.5) slopes followed by negative slopes at later time points; (4) sigmoidal: early positive slopes followed by zero slopes at later time points; and (5) rising: continuously positive slopes. For each topic, the LOWESS fits were also used to determine when the relative document frequency reached its peak, first reaching a threshold of 0.6 (chosen after trial and error for a range of 0.3 to 0.9), and the overall trend. The topics were then ordered based on (1) whether they belonged to the stable category or not; (2) whether the trends were decreasing, stable, or increasing; (3) the time the relative document frequency first reached 0.6; and (4) the time that the overall peak was reached ( S8 Data ).

Taxa information

To identify a taxon or taxa in all plant science records, NCBI Taxonomy taxdump datasets were downloaded from the NCBI FTP site ( https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/taxonomy/new_taxdump/ ) on September 20, 2022. The highest-level taxon was Viridiplantae, and all its child taxa were parsed and used as queries in searches against the plant science corpus. In addition, a species-over-time analysis was conducted using the same time bins as used for dynamic topic models. The number of records in different time bins for top taxa are in the genus, family, order, and additional species level sheet in S9 Data . The degree of over-/underrepresentation of a taxon X in a research topic T was assessed using the p -value of a Fisher’s exact test for a 2 × 2 table consisting of the numbers of records in both X and T, in X but not T, in T but not X, and in neither ( S10 Data ).

For analysis of plant taxa with genome information, genome data of taxa in Viridiplantae were obtained from the NCBI Genome data-hub ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/data-hub/genome ) on October 28, 2022. There were 2,384 plant genome assemblies belonging to 1,231 species in 559 genera (genome assembly sheet, S9 Data ). The date of the assembly was used as a proxy for the time when a genome was sequenced. However, some species have updated assemblies and have more recent data than when the genome first became available.

Taxa being studied in the plant science records

Flowering plants (Magnoliopsida) are found in 93% of records, while most other lineages are discussed in <1% of records, with conifers and related species being exceptions (Acrogynomsopermae, 3.5%, S6A Fig ). At the family level, the mustard (Brassicaceae), grass (Poaceae), pea (Fabaceae), and nightshade (Solanaceae) families are in 51% of records ( S6B Fig ). The prominence of the mustard family in plant science research is due to the Brassica and Arabidopsis genera ( Fig 4A ). When examining the prevalence of taxa being studied over time, clear patterns of turnovers emerged ( Figs 4B , S6C, and S6D ). While the study of monocot species (Liliopsida) has remained steady, there was a significant uptick in the prevalence of eudicot (eudicotyledon) records in the late 90s ( S6C Fig ), which can be attributed to the increased number of studies in the mustard, myrtle (Myrtaceae), and mint (Lamiaceae) families among others ( S6D Fig ). At the genus level, records mentioning Gossypium (cotton), Phaseolus (bean), Hordeum (wheat), and Zea (corn), similar to the topics in the early category, were prevalent till the 1980s or 1990s but have mostly decreased in number since ( Fig 4B ). In contrast, Capsicum , Arabidopsis , Oryza , Vitus , and Solanum research has become more prevalent over the last 20 years.

Geographical information for the plant science corpus

The geographical information (country) of authors in the plant science corpus was obtained from the address (AD) fields of first authors in Medline XML records accessible through the NCBI EUtility API ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK25501/ ). Because only first author affiliations are available for records published before December 2014, only the first author’s location was considered to ensure consistency between records before and after that date. Among the 421,658 records in the plant science corpus, 421,585 had Medline records and 421,276 had unique PMIDs. Among the records with unique PMIDs, 401,807 contained address fields. For each of the remaining records, the AD field content was split into tokens with a “,” delimiter, and the token likely containing geographical info (referred to as location tokens) was selected as either the last token or the second to last token if the last token contained “@” indicating the presence of an email address. Because of the inconsistency in how geographical information was described in the location tokens (e.g., country, state, city, zip code, name of institution, and different combinations of the above), the following 4 approaches were used to convert location tokens into countries.

The first approach was a brute force search where full names and alpha-3 codes of current countries (ISO 3166–1), current country subregions (ISO 3166–2), and historical country (i.e., country that no longer exists, ISO 3166–3) were used to search the address fields. To reduce false positives using alpha-3 codes, a space prior to each code was required for the match. The first approach allowed the identification of 361,242, 16,573, and 279,839 records with current country, historical country, and subregion information, respectively. The second method was the use of a heuristic based on common address field structures to identify “location strings” toward the end of address fields that likely represent countries, then the use of the Python pycountry module to confirm the presence of country information. This approach led to 329,025 records with country information. The third approach was to parse first author email addresses (90,799 records), recover top-level domain information, and use country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) data from the ISO 3166 Wikipedia page to define countries (72,640 records). Only a subset of email addresses contains country information because some are from companies (.com), nonprofit organizations (.org), and others. Because a large number of records with address fields still did not have country information after taking the above 3 approaches, another approach was implemented to query address fields against a locally installed Nominatim server (v.4.2.3, https://github.com/mediagis/nominatim-docker ) using OpenStreetMap data from GEOFABRIK ( https://www.geofabrik.de/ ) to find locations. Initial testing indicated that the use of full address strings led to false positives, and the computing resource requirement for running the server was high. Thus, only location strings from the second approach that did not lead to country information were used as queries. Because multiple potential matches were returned for each query, the results were sorted based on their location importance values. The above steps led to an additional 72,401 records with country information.

Examining the overlap in country information between approaches revealed that brute force current country and pycountry searches were consistent 97.1% of the time. In addition, both approaches had high consistency with the email-based approach (92.4% and 93.9%). However, brute force subregion and Nominatim-based predictions had the lowest consistencies with the above 3 approaches (39.8% to 47.9%) and each other. Thus, a record’s country information was finalized if the information was consistent between any 2 approaches, except between the brute force subregion and Nominatim searches. This led to 330,328 records with country information.

Topical and country impact metrics

To determine annual country impact, impact scores were determined in the same way as that for annual topical impact, except that values for different countries were calculated instead of topics ( S8 Data ).

Topical preferences by country

To determine topical preference for a country C , a 2 × 2 table was established with the number of records in topic T from C , the number of records in T but not from C , the number of non- T records from C , and the number of non- T records not from C . A Fisher’s exact test was performed for each T and C combination, and the resulting p -values were corrected for multiple testing with the Bejamini–Hochberg method (see S12 Data ). The preference of T in C was defined as the degree of enrichment calculated as log likelihood ratio of values in the 2 × 2 table. Topic 5 was excluded because >50% of the countries did not have records for this topic.

The top 10 countries could be classified into a China–India cluster, an Italy–Spain cluster, and remaining countries (yellow rectangles, Fig 5E ). The clustering of Italy and Spain is partly due to similar research focusing on allergens (topic 0) and mycotoxins (topic 54) and less emphasis on gene family (topic 23) and stress tolerance (topic 28) studies ( Figs 5F and S9 ). There are also substantial differences in topical focus between countries. For example, plant science records from China tend to be enriched in hyperspectral imaging and modeling (topic 9), gene family studies (topic 23), stress biology (topic 28), and research on new plant compounds associated with herbal medicine (topic 69), but less emphasis on population genetics and evolution (topic 86, Fig 5F ). In the US, there is a strong focus on insect pest resistance (topic 75), climate, community, and diversity (topic 83), and population genetics and evolution but less focus on new plant compounds. In summary, in addition to revealing how plant science research has evolved over time, topic modeling provides additional insights into differences in research foci among different countries.

Supporting information

S1 fig. plant science record classification model performance..

(A–C) Distributions of prediction probabilities (y_prob) of (A) positive instances (plant science records), (B) negative instances (non-plant science records), and (C) positive instances with the Medical Subject Heading “Plants” (ID = D010944). The data are color coded in blue and orange if they are correctly and incorrectly predicted, respectively. The lower subfigures contain log10-transformed x axes for the same distributions as the top subfigure for better visualization of incorrect predictions. (D) Prediction probability distribution for candidate plant science records. Prediction probabilities plotted here are available in S13 Data .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s001

S2 Fig. Relationships between outlier clusters and the 90 topics.

(A) Heatmap demonstrating that some outlier clusters tend to have high prediction scores for multiple topics. Each cell shows the average prediction score of a topic for records in an outlier cluster. (B) Size of outlier clusters.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s002

S3 Fig. Cosine similarities between topics.

(A) Heatmap showing cosine similarities between topic pairs. Top-left: hierarchical clustering of the cosine similarity matrix using the Ward algorithm. The branches are colored to indicate groups of related topics. (B) Topic labels and names. The topic ordering was based on hierarchical clustering of topics. Colored rectangles: neighboring topics with >0.5 cosine similarities.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s003

S4 Fig. Relative topical diversity for 20 journals.

The 20 journals with the most plant science records are shown. The journal names were taken from the journal list in PubMed ( https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/serfile_addedinfo.html ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s004

S5 Fig. Topical frequency and top terms during different time periods.

(A-D) Different patterns of topical frequency distributions for example topics (A) 48, (B) 35, (C) 27, and (D) 42. For each topic, the top graph shows the frequency of topical records in each time bin, which are the same as those in Fig 3 (green line), and the end date for each bin is indicated. The heatmap below each line plot depicts whether a term is among the top terms in a time bin (yellow) or not (blue). Blue dotted lines delineate different decades (see S5 Data for the original frequencies, S6 Data for the LOWESS fitted frequencies and the top terms for different topics/time bins).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s005

S6 Fig. Prevalence of records mentioning different taxonomic groups in Viridiplantae.

(A, B) Percentage of records mentioning specific taxa at the ( A) major lineage and (B) family levels. (C, D) The prevalence of taxon mentions over time at the (C) major lineage and (E) family levels. The data used for plotting are available in S9 Data .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s006

S7 Fig. Changes over time.

(A) Number of genera being mentioned in plant science records during different time bins (the date indicates the end date of that bin, exclusive). (B) Numbers of genera (blue) and organisms (salmon) with draft genomes available from National Center of Biotechnology Information in different years. (C) Percentage of US National Science Foundation (NSF) grants mentioning the genus Arabidopsis over time with peak percentage and year indicated. The data for (A–C) are in S9 Data . (D) Number of plant science records in the top 17 plant science journals from the USA (red), Great Britain (GBR) (orange), India (IND) (light green), and China (CHN) (dark green) normalized against the total numbers of publications of each country over time in these 17 journals. The data used for plotting can be found in S11 Data .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s007

S8 Fig. Change in country impact on plant science over time.

(A, B) Difference in 2 impact metrics from 1999 to 2020 for the 10 countries with the highest number of plant science records. (A) H-index. (B) SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). (C, D) Plots show the relationships between the impact metrics (H-index in (C) , SJR in (D) ) averaged from 1999 to 2020 and the slopes of linear fits with years as the predictive variable and impact metric as the response variable for different countries (A3 country codes shown). The countries with >400 records and with <10% missing impact values are included. The data used for plotting can be found in S11 Data .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s008

S9 Fig. Country topical preference.

Enrichment scores (LLR, log likelihood ratio) of topics for each of the top 10 countries. Red: overrepresentation, blue: underrepresentation. The data for plotting can be found in S12 Data .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s009

S1 Data. Summary of source journals for plant science records, prediction models, and top Tf-Idf features.

Sheet–Candidate plant sci record j counts: Number of records from each journal in the candidate plant science corpus (before classification). Sheet—Plant sci record j count: Number of records from each journal in the plant science corpus (after classification). Sheet–Model summary: Model type, text used (txt_flag), and model parameters used. Sheet—Model performance: Performance of different model and parameter combinations on the validation data set. Sheet–Tf-Idf features: The average SHAP values of Tf-Idf (Term frequency-Inverse document frequency) features associated with different terms. Sheet–PubMed number per year: The data for PubMed records in Fig 1A . Sheet–Plant sci record num per yr: The data for the plant science records in Fig 1A .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s010

S2 Data. Numbers of records in topics identified from preliminary topic models.

Sheet–Topics generated with a model based on BioBERT embeddings. Sheet–Topics generated with a model based on distilBERT embeddings. Sheet–Topics generated with a model based on SciBERT embeddings.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s011

S3 Data. Final topic model labels and top terms for topics.

Sheet–Topic label: The topic index and top 10 terms with the highest cTf-Idf values. Sheets– 0 to 89: The top 50 terms and their c-Tf-Idf values for topics 0 to 89.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s012

S4 Data. UMAP representations of different topics.

For a topic T , records in the UMAP graph are colored red and records not in T are colored gray.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s013

S5 Data. Temporal relationships between published documents projected onto 2D space.

The 2D embedding generated with UMAP was used to plot document relationships for each year. The plots from 1975 to 2020 were compiled into an animation.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s014

S6 Data. Timestamps and dates for dynamic topic modeling.

Sheet–bin_timestamp: Columns are: (1) order index; (2) bin_idx–relative positions of bin labels; (3) bin_timestamp–UNIX time in seconds; and (4) bin_date–month/day/year. Sheet–Topic frequency per timestamp: The number of documents in each time bin for each topic. Sheets–LOWESS fit 0.1/0.2/0.3: Topic frequency per timestamp fitted with the fraction parameter of 0.1, 0.2, or 0.3. Sheet—Topic top terms: The top 5 terms for each topic in each time bin.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s015

S7 Data. Locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOWESS) of topical document frequencies over time.

There are 90 scatter plots, one for each topic, where the x axis is time, and the y axis is the document frequency (blue dots). The LOWESS fit is shown as orange points connected with a green line. The category a topic belongs to and its order in Fig 3 are labeled on the top left corner. The data used for plotting are in S6 Data .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s016

S8 Data. The 4 criteria used for sorting topics.

Peak: the time when the LOWESS fit of the frequencies of a topic reaches maximum. 1st_reach_thr: the time when the LOWESS fit first reaches a threshold of 60% maximal frequency (peak value). Trend: upward (1), no change (0), or downward (−1). Stable: whether a topic belongs to the stable category (1) or not (0).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s017

S9 Data. Change in taxon record numbers and genome assemblies available over time.

Sheet–Genus: Number of records mentioning a genus during different time periods (in Unix timestamp) for the top 100 genera. Sheet–Genus: Number of records mentioning a family during different time periods (in Unix timestamp) for the top 100 families. Sheet–Genus: Number of records mentioning an order during different time periods (in Unix timestamp) for the top 20 orders. Sheet–Species levels: Number of records mentioning 12 selected taxonomic levels higher than the order level during different time periods (in Unix timestamp). Sheet–Genome assembly: Plant genome assemblies available from NCBI as of October 28, 2022. Sheet–Arabidopsis NSF: Absolute and normalized numbers of US National Science Foundation funded proposals mentioning Arabidopsis in proposal titles and/or abstracts.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s018

S10 Data. Taxon topical preference.

Sheet– 5 genera LLR: The log likelihood ratio of each topic in each of the top 5 genera with the highest numbers of plant science records. Sheets– 5 genera: For each genus, the columns are: (1) topic; (2) the Fisher’s exact test p -value (Pvalue); (3–6) numbers of records in topic T and in genus X (n_inT_inX), in T but not in X (n_inT_niX), not in T but in X (n_niT_inX), and not in T and X (n_niT_niX) that were used to construct 2 × 2 tables for the tests; and (7) the log likelihood ratio generated with the 2 × 2 tables. Sheet–corrected p -value: The 4 values for generating LLRs were used to conduct Fisher’s exact test. The p -values obtained for each country were corrected for multiple testing.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s019

S11 Data. Impact metrics of countries in different years.

Sheet–country_top25_year_count: number of total publications and publications per year from the top 25 countries with the most plant science records. Sheet—country_top25_year_top17j: number of total publications and publications per year from the top 25 countries with the highest numbers of plant science records in the 17 plant science journals used as positive examples. Sheet–prank: Journal percentile rank scores for countries (3-letter country codes following https://www.iban.com/country-codes ) in different years from 1999 to 2020. Sheet–sjr: Scimago Journal rank scores. Sheet–hidx: H-Index scores. Sheet–cite: Citation scores.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s020

S12 Data. Topical enrichment for the top 10 countries with the highest numbers of plant science publications.

Sheet—Log likelihood ratio: For each country C and topic T, it is defined as log((a/b)/(c/d)) where a is the number of papers from C in T, b is the number from C but not in T, c is the number not from C but in T, d is the number not from C and not in T. Sheet: corrected p -value: The 4 values, a, b, c, and d, were used to conduct Fisher’s exact test. The p -values obtained for each country were corrected for multiple testing.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s021

S13 Data. Text classification prediction probabilities.

This compressed file contains the PubMed ID (PMID) and the prediction probabilities (y_pred) of testing data with both positive and negative examples (pred_prob_testing), plant science candidate records with the MeSH term “Plants” (pred_prob_candidates_with_mesh), and all plant science candidate records (pred_prob_candidates_all). The prediction probability was generated using the Word2Vec text classification models for distinguishing positive (plant science) and negative (non-plant science) records.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002612.s022

Acknowledgments

We thank Maarten Grootendorst for discussions on topic modeling. We also thank Stacey Harmer, Eva Farre, Ning Jiang, and Robert Last for discussion on their respective research fields and input on how to improve this study and Rudiger Simon for the suggestion to examine differences between countries. We also thank Mae Milton, Christina King, Edmond Anderson, Jingyao Tang, Brianna Brown, Kenia Segura Abá, Eleanor Siler, Thilanka Ranaweera, Huan Chen, Rajneesh Singhal, Paulo Izquierdo, Jyothi Kumar, Daniel Shiu, Elliott Shiu, and Wiggler Catt for their good ideas, personal and professional support, collegiality, fun at parties, as well as the trouble they have caused, which helped us improve as researchers, teachers, mentors, and parents.

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Exploring the role of risk gene CNTN4 and APP in neuronal development

Dr asami oguro-ando tells us about the research published in her new open biology paper, a study which explores the pivotal role of the gene cntn4 and app in neuronal development..

Please could you tell us a little bit about your article?

We are excited to announce our recent publication, " CNTN4 Modulates Neural Elongation through Interplay with APP ," featured in Open Biology . This study delves into the intricate relationship between risk gene the neuronal cell molecule contactin-4 (CNTN4) and amyloid precursor protein (APP), elucidating their roles in neurodevelopmental disorders and Alzheimer's disease. We've detailed how CNTN4, a neuronal cell adhesion molecule, is instrumental in shaping neuronal morphology and spine density. Additionally, our findings reveal a co-dependent interaction between CNTN4 and APP crucial for neurite outgrowth, alongside a novel compensatory expression mechanism between these proteins.

What is the significance of CNTN4 and why did you choose to focus on this?

CNTN4 caught our attention during our research into 3p26 deletion syndrome—a condition linked with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), as cited in Gandawijaya et al., 2021 . While CNTN4 is identified as a candidate gene for ASD, its functional roles were not well understood. This gap in knowledge spurred us to explore how CNTN4 functions within the brain, particularly its interactions with proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

Co-author Madeline Eve and Asami Oguro-Ando, University of Exeter

Co-authors Madeline Eve and Asami Oguro-Ando, University of Exeter.

Were there any surprising findings from the study?

Our research uncovered that CNTN4 not only contributes to neural elongation in the Frontal Cortex but also regulates its expression alongside APP, a protein implicated in Alzheimer's disease. It was quite remarkable to discover that CNTN4, a gene linked to developmental processes, also plays a role in modulating factors involved in Alzheimer's disease. This intersection of developmental and neurodegenerative pathways offers exciting new insights into the broader implications of these proteins.

What’s next for you or your group’s research?

Looking ahead, our group is keen to further dissect the molecular mechanisms underpinning the interaction between CNTN4 and APP and explore their wider implications for disorders like Alzheimer's and ASD. Our next steps involve clarifying how the CNTN4-APP interaction impacts neural activity. Understanding this interaction is crucial as it represents a fundamental step towards a comprehensive grasp of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders.

Group members at the University of Exeter including co-authors Josan Gandawijaya, Rosie Bamford and Madeline Eve.

How did you find the Review Commons process and publishing with Open Biology ?

Our experience with Review Commons was exceptionally constructive. The streamlined peer review process facilitated a more efficient publication route, allowing us to refine our research with valuable feedback effectively. The impartial comments from reviewers who were not targeting a specific journal and the positive feedback aimed at enhancing our paper's quality were particularly striking. This process not only expedited our ability to share significant findings but also elevated the quality of our publication through rigorous peer evaluations. We are thoroughly satisfied with the outcome in Open Biology and are deeply appreciative of the genuine engagement from the journal in handling our revisions.

Dr. Oguro-Ando is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School and has been interested in life science since she was a child, especially, how lives play rolls in plasticity to the environment. Asami’s group research aim is to further our understanding of the molecules, cells and circuits that underlie neurodevelopmental disorders affecting mental health including Autism is critical for developing more effective therapies for these disorders.

Open Biology accepts papers via Review Commons saving authors time by facilitates quicker, informed decisions without restarting the peer review process. We are looking to publish more high-quality research articles in cellular and molecular biology. Find out more about our author benefits and submission process .

Image credits: Hero image: Human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells. Credit: Madeline Eve. Photo credits: Asami Oguro-Ando.

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How to Craft Your Ideal Thesis Research Topic

Catherine Miller

Writing your undergraduate thesis is probably one of the most interesting parts of studying, especially because you get to choose your area of study. But as both a student and a teacher who’s helped countless students develop their research topics, I know this freedom can be just as intimidating as it is liberating.

Fortunately, there’a a step-by-step process you can follow that will help make the whole process a lot easier. In this article, I’ll show you how to choose a unique, specific thesis topic that’s true to your passions and interests, while making a contribution to your field.

Choose a topic that you’re interested in

First things first: double-check with your teachers or supervisor if there are any constraints on your research topic. Once your parameters are clear, it’s time to identify what lights you up — after all, you’re going to be spending a lot of time thinking about it.

Within your field of study, you probably already have some topics that have grabbed your attention more than others. This can be a great place to start. Additionally, consider using the rest of your academic and extra-curricular interests as a source of ideas. At this stage, you only need a broad topic before you narrow it down to a specific question.

If you’re feeling stuck, here are some things to try:

Look back through old course notes to remind yourself of topics you previously covered. Do any of these inspire you?
Talk to potential supervisors about your ideas, as they can point you toward areas you might not have considered.
Think about the things you enjoy in everyday life — whether that’s cycling, cinema, cooking, or fashion — then consider if there are any overlaps with your field of study.
Imagine you have been asked to give a presentation or record a podcast in the next three days. What topics would you feel confident discussing?
Watch a selection of existing lectures or explainer videos, or listen to podcasts by experts in your field. Note which topics you feel curious to explore further.
Discuss your field of study with teachers friends and family, some with existing knowledge and some without. Which aspects do you enjoy talking about?

By doing all this, you might uncover some unusual and exciting avenues for research. For example, when writing my Master’s dissertation, I decided to combine my field of study (English teaching methodology) with one of my passions outside work (creative writing). In my undergraduate course, a friend drew on her lived experience of disability to look into the literary portrayal of disability in the ancient world.

Do your research

Once you’ve chosen your topic of interest, it’s time to dive into research. This is a really important part of this early process because it allows you to:

See what other people have written about the topic — you don’t want to cover the same old ground as everyone else.
Gain perspective on the big questions surrounding the topic.
Go deeper into the parts that interest you to help you decide where to focus.
Start building your bibliography and a bank of interesting quotations.

A great way to start is to visit your library for an introductory book. For example, the “A Very Short Introduction” series from the Oxford University Press provides overviews of a range of themes. Similar types of overviews may have the title “ A Companion to [Subject]” or “[Subject] A Student Companion”. Ask your librarian or teacher if you’re not sure where to begin.

Your introductory volume can spark ideas for further research, and the bibliography can give you some pointers about where to go next. You can also use keywords to research online via academic sites like JStor or Google Scholar. Check which subscriptions are available via your institution.

At this stage, you may not wish to read every single paper you come across in full — this could take a very long time and not everything will be relevant. Summarizing software like Wordtune could be very useful here.

Just upload a PDF or link to an online article using Wordtune, and it will produce a summary of the whole paper with a list of key points. This helps you to quickly sift through papers to grasp their central ideas and identify which ones to read in full.

Screenshot of Wordtune's summarizing tool

Get Wordtune for free > Get Wordtune for free >

You can also use Wordtune for semantic search. In this case, the tool focuses its summary around your chosen search term, making it even easier to get what you need from the paper.

As you go, make sure you keep organized notes of what you’ve read, including the author and publication information and the page number of any citations you want to use.

Some people are happy to do this process with pen and paper, but if you prefer a digital method, there are several software options, including Zotero , EndNote , and Mendeley . Your institution may have an existing subscription so check before you sign up.

Narrowing down your thesis research topic

Now you’ve read around the topic, it’s time to narrow down your ideas so you can craft your final question. For example, when it came to my undergraduate thesis, I knew I wanted to write about Ancient Greek religion and I was interested in the topic of goddesses. So, I:

Did some wide reading around the topic of goddesses
Learned that the goddess Hera was not as well researched as others and that there were some fascinating aspects I wanted to explore
Decided (with my supervisor’s support) to focus on her temples in the Argive region of Greece

As part of this process, it can be helpful to consider the “5 Ws”: why, what, who, when, and where, as you move from the bigger picture to something more precise.

Why did you choose this research topic?

Come back to the reasons you originally chose your theme. What grabbed you? Why is this topic important to you — or to the wider world? In my example, I knew I wanted to write about goddesses because, as a woman, I was interested in how a society in which female lives were often highly controlled dealt with having powerful female deities. My research highlighted Hera as one of the most powerful goddesses, tying into my key interest.

What are some of the big questions about your topic?

During your research, you’ll probably run into the same themes time and time again. Some of the questions that arise may not have been answered yet or might benefit from a fresh look.

Equally, there may be questions that haven’t yet been asked, especially if you are approaching the topic from a modern perspective or combining research that hasn’t been considered before. This might include taking a post-colonial, feminist, or queer approach to older texts or bringing in research using new scientific methods.

In my example, I knew there were still controversies about why so many temples to the goddess Hera were built in a certain region, and was keen to explore these further.

Who is the research topic relevant to?

Considering the “who” might help you open up new avenues. Is there a particular audience you want to reach? What might they be interested in? Is this a new audience for this field? Are there people out there who might be affected by the outcome of this research — for example, people with a particular medical condition — who might be able to use your conclusions?

Which period will you focus on?

Depending on the nature of your field, you might be able to choose a timeframe, which can help narrow the topic down. For example, you might focus on historical events that took place over a handful of years, look at the impact of a work of literature at a certain point after its publication, or review scientific progress over the last five years.

With my thesis, I decided to focus on the time when the temples were built rather than considering the hundreds of years for which they have existed, which would have taken me far too long.

Where does your topic relate to?

Place can be another means of narrowing down the topic. For example, consider the impact of your topic on a particular neighborhood, city, or country, rather than trying to process a global question.

In my example, I chose to focus my research on one area of Greece, where there were lots of temples to Hera. This meant skipping other important locations, but including these would have made the thesis too wide-ranging.

Create an outline and get feedback

Once you have an idea of what you are going to write about, create an outline or summary and get feedback from your teacher(s). It’s okay if you don’t know exactly how you’re going to answer your thesis question yet, but based on your research you should have a rough plan of the key points you want to cover. So, for me, the outline was as follows:

Context: who was the goddess Hera?
Overview of her sanctuaries in the Argive region
Their initial development
Political and cultural influences
The importance of the mythical past

In the final thesis, I took a strong view on why the goddess was so important in this region, but it took more research, writing, and discussion with my supervisor to pin down my argument.

To choose a thesis research topic, find something you’re passionate about, research widely to get the big picture, and then move to a more focused view. Bringing a fresh perspective to a popular theme, finding an underserved audience who could benefit from your research, or answering a controversial question can make your thesis stand out from the crowd.

For tips on how to start writing your thesis, don’t miss our advice on writing a great research abstract and a stellar literature review . And don’t forget that Wordtune can also support you with proofreading, making it even easier to submit a polished thesis.

How do you come up with a research topic for a thesis?

To help you find a thesis topic, speak to your professor, look through your old course notes, think about what you already enjoy in everyday life, talk about your field of study with friends and family, and research podcasts and videos to find a topic that is interesting for you. It’s a good idea to refine your topic so that it’s not too general or broad.

Do you choose your own thesis topic?

Yes, you usually choose your own thesis topic. You can get help from your professor(s), friends, and family to figure out which research topic is interesting to you.

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Tocilizumab is associated with reduced delirium and coma in critically ill patients with COVID-19

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150 Best Biology Research Paper Topics
150 Best Biology Research Paper Topics
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Engaging Biology Research Topics of 2023
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100 Biology Research Topics for Students & Researchers
Biological Psychology Research Paper Topics. Neurobiological mechanisms underlying memory formation. Impact of sleep disorders on cognitive function and mental health. Biological basis of personality traits and behavior. Neural correlates of emotions and emotional disorders. Role of neuroplasticity in brain recovery after injury.
150 Actual Biology Research Paper Topics
3.9 15 Plant Pathology Biology Research Topics. 3.10 15 Animals Biology Research Topics. 3.11 15 Marine Biology Research Topics. 3.12 15 Zoology Research Topics. 3.13 15 Genetics Research Topics. 3.14 15 Biotechnology Research Topics. 3.15 15 Evolutionary Biology Research Topics. Biology is one of the most magnetic fields of study these days ...
200+ Interesting Biology Research Topics For Students In 2023
Biology Research Topics For College Students. 1. Investigating the role of genetic mutations in cancer development. See also Top 100 Spring Boot Project Ideas [Updated] 2. Analyzing the impact of climate changes on wildlife populations. 3. Studying the ecology of invasive species in urban environments. 4.
49 Most Interesting Biology Research Topics
The first of our potentially easy biology research topics: climate change and ecosystems. Investigate how ecosystems respond and adapt to the changing climate. And learn about shifts in species distributions, phenology, and ecological interactions. 1) How are different ecosystems responding to temperature changes and altered precipitation ...
212 Essential Biology Research Topics That Will Impress You
You can either write an essay or paper with the following interesting biology research topics: Human emotions and conflicts with their intellectual intelligence. Emotions: Its influence on art and music and how the perception of art influences the world. The consequences of marijuana and alcohol on teenagers.
Top 50 Life and Biological Sciences Articles
Top 50 Life and Biological Sciences Articles. We are pleased to share with you the 50 most read Nature Communications articles* in life and biological sciences published in 2019. Featuring authors ...
300+ Biology Research Paper Topics for Students
Biological Psychology Research Paper Topics. Neurotransmitters and Behavior: Examining the Role of Dopamine, Serotonin, and Acetylcholine. Neuroplasticity: Implications for Learning, Memory, and Brain Rehabilitation. Brain Imaging Techniques: Advances in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Neuroimaging.
350+ Biology Research Topics
Biology Research Topics. Biology Research Topics are as follows: The role of gut microbiota in human health and disease. The effects of climate change on animal behavior and physiology. The molecular mechanisms of cancer development and progression. The evolutionary origins of human language. The impact of pesticides on insect populations and ...
Biological sciences
Biological sciences encompasses all the divisions of natural sciences examining various aspects of vital processes. The concept includes anatomy, physiology, cell biology, biochemistry and ...
Molecular biology
Molecular Biology is the field of biology that studies the composition, structure and interactions of cellular molecules such as nucleic acids and proteins that carry out the biological processes ...
Excellent biology research topics you've been searching for!
Here's another list of great topics for your biology research. Understanding quantitative ecology. The causes of acidification of seas and its consequences. Immortality of jellyfish. The difference between seawater and freshwater. The evolution of the deep sea. The communication techniques of whales. Coral reefs and their importance to seawater.
Biology Research Paper Topics
See our list of biology research paper topics . Biology (from the Greek bios, meaning "life") is the science of all forms of life, including plants, animals, and microorganisms. Biology is composed of many fields, including microbiology, the study of microscopic organisms such as viruses and bacteria; cytology, the study of cells ...
200+ Biology Research Topics for Students
A List of Researchable Topics for Biology. A list of researchable topics for biology students starts with several interesting biological topics concerning sociological perspective and ethical issues. The most debatable subjects are abortion, human cloning, genetic researches and the new ethics that should be created to resolve these issues.
100 Biology Research Topics Ideas For Students
To make things as simple as possible for you, we've put together a list of biology research project ideas. You will find 100 topics on various subjects below. Of course, you can use any of our topics for free. However, keep in mind that even though we are doing our best to maintain this list fresh, other students will find it as well.
120 Biology Research Paper Topics
Marine Biology Research Paper Topics: The impact of climate change on coral reef ecosystems. The role of marine protected areas in conserving biodiversity. The effects of ocean acidification on marine organisms. Investigating the behavior and communication patterns of marine mammals. The ecological significance of seagrass meadows in coastal ...
Exploring Fascinating Biology Research Paper Topics
The Ultimate Compilation of Unique Biology Research Paper Topics. Studying biology is essential for us to comprehend the intricacies of life. That is why students are often asked to research the subject. One of the most important parts of this process is choosing the right topic about biology.
10 Most Interesting Biology Research Topics
Some biology topics are easier for non-biologists to get more excited about than others, though. Whether you're looking for a research topic for a college paper or an area to specialize in if you're majoring in biology, here are some of the most interesting things going on in the biology world right now. 1. CRISPR and Genetic Engineering
Engaging Biology Research Topics of 2023
Biology research is a serious analytical task that usually contains scientific findings, debatable questions, and detailed explanations. Students who are studying biology may get an assignment to find some interesting biological topics to do research for essays, term papers, and scientific reports.
Articles
Stem cells are thought to alleviate the damage caused by chemotherapy drugs and to play role... YuSheng Zhang, YaNan Liu, Zi Teng, ZeLin Wang, Peng Zhu, ZhiXin Wang, FuJun Liu and XueXia Liu. Biological Research 2023 56 :47. Research article Published on: 13 August 2023.
Cell biology
Cell biology is the discipline of biological sciences that studies the structure, physiology, growth, reproduction and death of cells. Research in cell biology uses microscopic and molecular tools ...
30 Research Ideas in Biology for High School Students
Here are 30 research ideas for high school students to stimulate inquiry and enhance their understanding of biological principles. 1. Genetics and Heredity: Understanding Life's Blueprint. Genetics and heredity are the foundation of life's diversity.
200 Biology Research Topics For High School
200 Biology Research Topics For High School. February 2, 2022 by Sananda Bhattacharya. Research papers are an integral part of high school. A detailed research paper is required in most of the subjects, and one just cannot back out, as this is a part of their curriculum. However, what is even more laborious than writing the whole research paper ...
Assessing the evolution of research topics in a biological field using
The least connected topics include topic 0 (allergen research, median cosine similarity = 0.12), topic 21 (clock biology, 0.12), topic 1 (tissue culture, 0.15), and topic 69 (identification of compounds with spectroscopic methods, 0.15; all t test p-values < 1 × 10 −24). Topics 0, 1, and 69 are specialized topics; it is surprising that topic ...
Exploring the role of risk gene CNTN4 and APP in neuronal development
Open Biology accepts papers via Review Commons saving authors time by facilitates quicker, informed decisions without restarting the peer review process. We are looking to publish more high-quality research articles in cellular and molecular biology. Find out more about our author benefits and submission process. Image credits:
Your Step-by-Step Guide to Choosing a Thesis Research Topic.
Choose a topic that you're interested in. First things first: double-check with your teachers or supervisor if there are any constraints on your research topic. Once your parameters are clear, it's time to identify what lights you up — after all, you're going to be spending a lot of time thinking about it.
Top 100 in Cell and Molecular Biology
Explore our most highly accessed cell and molecular biology articles in 2018. Featuring authors from around the World, these papers highlight valuable research within cell and molecular biology ...
(Re) Designing the Tree of Robotic Life
Keywords: tree of life, robot, evolution, bio-inspired robotics . Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements.Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
Math discovery provides new method to study cell activity, aging
Galen Collins, assistant professor in MSU's Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Entomology and Plant Pathology, co-authored the groundbreaking paper published in the Proceedings of the ...
AI uncovers how plant science evolved
A new AI analysis of plant biology papers reveals what research topics countries are prioritizing and how different tools and technologies have steered the field. Why it matters: AI is often ...
Biological sciences
The association between three prevalent autoimmune disorders and the likelihood of developing prostate cancer: a Mendelian randomization study. Xiaoqian Deng. , Shiwei Sun. & Yangang Zhang ...

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150 Actual Biology Research Paper Topics

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