biology ramblings

One of the major limitations of current biology research is the availability of sufficient quality and quantities of biological material.  Cell culture systems are available that recapitulate many important biological processes, but in many ways research is limited by the limitations of these systems.  In the future several avenues could be used to overcome current limitations in the biological material for research.  The first is the creation of new cell culture systems and the development of new method to collect primary tissue samples.  Clearly, this type of advance will give researchers new systems and source of material to study.  The second avenue is to improve genomic assays to work on smaller quantities of starting material.  This would allow work on highly pure specimens of rare primary cells types that cannot be isolated in sufficient quantities for current methods.  Ideally, it would be possible to assay the genome-sequence, histone modification pattern, DNA methylation state, transcription factor occupancy, and RNA content of a single cell.