To all GiS 2022 contestants: Thank you!

To the 602 student teams who contributed proposals to Genes in Space 2022: Thank you for sharing your ideas to advance the wildest frontier of biological research, and for doing your part to envision humanity's future in space.

For the last two weeks, our team has been poring over your proposals. We've read them, read them again (and again), critiqued them, picked at them, argued over them, and passed them around to share our favorite ideas with our colleagues. Through your ideas, you've inspired us, challenged us, and persuaded us.

Some of the reviewers on our panel are responsible for developing the tools in the Genes in Space toolkit. As rewarding as it is has been to launch those tools to space, it is immeasurably more rewarding to read about the innovative uses you have imagined for them.

We haven't yet picked our winning experiment. But we have (almost!) picked our pool of semifinalists, and the strength of that pool tells us that the experiment that will launch in 2023 will make a tangible impact on the nascent field of space biology.

Stay tuned: On Monday, we will announce our semifinalists, as well as our Junior Scientist Awardees and Constellation Awardees. Until then, know that whatever the outcome of the contest, you've helped the scientists and engineers on our review panel imagine a different future for space biology.

Yours in science,

The Genes in Space team