BioDevelopers are self taught, love laptops, Twitter, ML, Benchling and continue to stick to Excel.

Hello there, fellow tech bio enthusiasts!

The results from the BioDevelopers survey are in.

We asked roughly 160 biotech enthusiasts about their coding habits, career aspirations, and favorite lab equipment.

Biodevelopers

So, who are these people? Half of them have a doctoral degree. They work in all sorts of fields, but the majority are focused on the biopharma space and a solid chunk are in academia.

• 20% identify as wet lab scientist (e.g. Protein Engineer, Metabolic Engineer, Strain Engineer, Biochemist, Molecular biologist, Microbiologist, Synthetic biologist).

• 70% work in an in silico role (e.g. Software Engineer, ML Engineer/Researcher, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Computational Biologist/Bioinformatician, Computational Chemist/Cheminformatician).

• 14% identify as both wet lab and in silico scientist

• 28% work in a role as management, clinician/doctor, or other.

Most biologists write code

A large proportion of wet lab scientists (87%!) indicate that they write code. Respondents have been coding for an average of 6.8 years not including education (median 3.5 years) and an average of 8.9 years including education and personal coding (median 5.5 years).

Self taught computer scientists

When it comes to coding, 74% of them learned the ropes by "just doing it", followed by school or formal education (63%), online resources such as videos and blogs (45%) and books/physical media (29%). This finding is fascinating, because our respondents are working on super complex problems. We can only assume that means they locked themselves in a lab and emerged months later with a newfound talent for Python and R.

And speaking of languages, the top picks for BioDevelopers are Python, R, Shell, and SQL. They love these languages so much that they plan to keep working with them for the next 12 months.

Machine learning is hot 🔥

Machine learning (ML) is popular among biodevelopers: 73% of respondents indicate that they use ML in their work. People working in an in silico role are slightly more likely to use ML (80%) versus wet lab scientists, but 68% of wet lab scientists in our survey also indicated that they use ML. Among those who don’t yet use machine learning in their work, 82% say they would be interested in using machine learning in their work.

The case for social media to stay up to date

When it comes to staying up to date in their field, biologists are turning to some unexpected sources. The top spot for keeping up with the latest news and research is Twitter. A whopping 74% said they turn to Twitter to stay up to date in their field. Following close behind is Biorxiv, at 60%. The more traditional journals and conferences also remain popular sources of information, with 55% and 51% of respondents respectively saying they use these to stay up to date. Respondents also use Google Scholar (50%), LinkedIn (49%) and Bits in Bio (43%) to stay up to date.

It's interesting to see how social media has become a valuable tool for professionals in the life sciences. By following experts in their field, biologists can quickly get access to breaking news and cutting-edge research.

AWS, Benchling, Matplotlib, Excel and your laptop are all you need!

Most of the participants (79%) used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their preferred cloud platform, followed by Google Cloud (45%) and Microsoft Azure (15%). The most popular file formats used by the respondents were CSV/TSV, JSON, FASTA, FASTQ, and BAM/SAM. Interestingly, despite the availability of various data visualization tools, Excel remained a favorite among the participants with 37% of respondents using it. However, Matplotlib was the most commonly used tool (63%), followed by Plotly (45%).

Benchling, (36%) is by far the most popular LIMS/ELN, followed by BaseSpace, and LabVantage. Other GUI life science tools that people like are IGV, Geneious, and Pymol.

As for lab equipment, some unexpected answers emerged. The number one favorite piece of equipment? Their computers, of course! We guess BioDevelopers are just like the rest of us: hopelessly addicted to their screens. But there were some more lab favorites, too, like DNA sequencers, microscopes, and mass spec analysis machines.

Protein curious biodevelopers

At Cradle, we were specifically interested in protein engineering. Turns out, 28.6% of our BioDevelopers have worked with proteins. Enzymes, antibodies, short peptides, and gene regulatory proteins were all on the menu. And for those who haven't dabbled in protein engineering yet, 59% said they might in the future. Interestingly, many people who don’t yet work on proteins are interested in working on gene regulatory proteins.

So what's the future of protein engineering? Stability optimization, discovering novel function, and improving binding affinity are all high on the list of design objectives. But don't worry, BioDevelopers, we won't ask you to pick just one. We know you're multi-tasking experts, with 43% running only one or two projects at a time, and 19% running a whole bunch at once.

Bits in Bio Community

Biodevelopers don’t just stay up to date on scientific research through Twitter – it’s also the most common way that they learned about Bits in Bio (40%), followed by word of mouth (33%). More than half (52%) of respondents consider themselves a member of the Bits in Bio Community and most find the Bits in Bio Slack channel (43%) as the most useful resource. So if you haven’t joined yet, what are you waiting for!

Some demographic insights

Bio Developers and technologists are a diverse group of individuals across many spectrums. We are committed to continuing to ensure our community is inclusive and welcoming to all.

The majority of responses came from the 🇺🇸 US (62%), followed by the 🇬🇧United Kingdom (7%), the 🇳🇱Netherlands (5%), 🇨🇦 Canada (5%), 🇩🇪Germany (4%), 🇨🇭Switzerland (4%), 🇫🇷 France (2%), Australia, Belgium, India, Brazil, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Israel, Portugal, Russia and Slovenia.

The majority of respondents (80%) identifies as man, 13% as woman, 7% prefer not to say/ non-binary. We see a nice age distribution with the majority of respondents born in the late eighties, and nineties.

Want to know more?

Check out all results here: https://www.stateoftechbio.com/ or download the public data to start analysing.

Next time: a shorter survey.

All in all, it's been a wild ride through the world of BioDevelopers. We hope you've enjoyed the journey as much as we have. And to those who thought the survey was too long? Don’t worry, next time we’ll shorten it, especially the number of questions focusing on programming languages for different tasks. We’d love to get more responses, because the number of responses is what makes for example the Stack Overflow Developer Survey so useful. We’d love to hear from you readers:

• Was BioDeveloper survey the right name or did it skew towards those working in silico?

• Where should we post the survey to get more responses?

• What else do you think we should do differently next time?

Please email survey@cradle.bio with your thoughts!

Note:

For most questions, respondents were allowed to choose multiple answers.
This is why % will not always up to 100%.