Every guide below is planned, scheduled, and open to sponsorship. Book against a topic your buyers are already researching — and reach them at the point they are drawing up a shortlist, not after.
Every topic is independently researched and written by our editorial team. Sponsorship buys visibility and association — never editorial control, and never a favourable verdict. Every placement is labelled.
One per topic. Logo lock-up on the header, a full-width placement inside the piece, and first position in the vendor directory.
Up to three per topic. Attached to a single chapter, with an in-line unit and a linked profile in the directory.
An enhanced entry in the topic’s vendor directory — specs, imagery, and a direct link — for advertisers who want presence without a headline spend.
10 guides scheduled through July 2027. Topics are locked; scope is finalised roughly eight weeks before publication, which is also when we welcome sponsor input on what the guide should cover. Readers see the same schedule on our buying guides page.
From multichannel pipettes to full robotic workcells
A decision tree by throughput, budget, and walk-away time — covering the whole span from a better multichannel to a workcell that runs overnight.
Sequencers for core facilities and mid-size labs
A side-by-side read on benchtop sequencers, from run cost to turnaround.
Quadrupole vs. Orbitrap vs. TOF — which analyzer fits your lab?
Analyzer selection for labs weighing resolution against speed, sample load, and what the service contract will cost over five years.
Comparing Google Co-Scientist, GPT-Rosalind, Claude Science, and the rest
Where the research-assistant models have moved past the demo — and where procurement should still be sceptical.
Confocal, super-resolution, light-sheet, and what your core facility won’t tell you
Matching imaging technique to the biological question and the budget, from routine cameras to billion-pixel systems.
Columns, detectors, and the true cost per sample
An update to our most-read comparison work, costed per sample rather than per instrument.
From benchtop to 2,000 L
What scales, what breaks, and the point at which single-use stops paying for itself.
The 2027 guide to gene editing tools — base, prime, bridge RNA, and RNA editing
The full editing toolbox and how labs are choosing between the parts of it, now that the patent picture has settled.
Choosing lab software your team will actually use
The software layer labs complain about most — selection criteria, migration cost, and what “integration” is worth in practice.
−80s, LN2, and monitoring systems that actually prevent sample loss
Storage, monitoring, and failure planning — including the energy costs that now sit alongside the purchase price.
Booking closes four weeks before publication; creative is due two weeks after that. Sponsors who book before the scope call get to weigh in on the questions the guide sets out to answer.
| Guide | Publishes | Booking closes | Materials due | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Lab Automation & Liquid Handling Buyer’s Guide | October 2026 | 14 Sep 2026 | 28 Sep 2026 | Limited slots |
| Benchtop NGS Platforms Compared | November 2026 | 4 Oct 2026 | 18 Oct 2026 | Slots open |
| Mass Spectrometer Buyer’s Guide 2026 | December 2026 | 2 Nov 2026 | 16 Nov 2026 | Slots open |
| The AI Scientist Landscape 2027 | January 2027 | 6 Dec 2026 | 20 Dec 2026 | Slots open |
| The Microscopy Buyer’s Guide | February 2027 | 4 Jan 2027 | 18 Jan 2027 | Slots open |
| HPLC & UHPLC Systems Buyer’s Guide | March 2027 | 8 Feb 2027 | 22 Feb 2027 | Slots open |
| Bioreactor & Single-Use Bioprocessing Buyer’s Guide | April 2027 | 5 Mar 2027 | 19 Mar 2027 | Slots open |
| CRISPR and Beyond | May 2027 | 5 Apr 2027 | 19 Apr 2027 | Slots open |
| The LIMS & ELN Buyer’s Guide | June 2027 | 2 May 2027 | 16 May 2027 | Slots open |
| Lab Freezer & Cold Storage Buyer’s Guide | July 2027 | 7 Jun 2027 | 21 Jun 2027 | Slots open |
The ten guides above are the ones with dates against them. These 64 are the whole programme, grouped by theme — and sponsor interest is the main thing that moves an undated topic up the schedule. If the one you want is not booked in yet, ask.
Instrument and equipment guides written for shortlist-stage buyers. Each carries a comparison matrix and a vendor directory.
From multichannel pipettes to full robotic workcells
A decision tree by throughput, budget, and walk-away time.
Sequencers for core facilities and mid-size labs
Run cost, turnaround, and the consumable ecosystem behind each platform.
Quadrupole vs. Orbitrap vs. TOF — which analyzer fits your lab?
Analyzer selection for labs weighing resolution against speed and cost.
Absorbance, fluorescence, and multimode compared
Multimode readers, stackers, and imaging hybrids — the specs that matter and the ones that don’t.
Spectral vs. conventional, and when a benchtop sorter is enough
A panel-size decision framework for labs sizing their first or next cytometer.
Can a 60–100 MHz compact instrument replace your facility time?
Where compact NMR genuinely substitutes for facility access, and where it does not.
Confocal, super-resolution, light-sheet, and what your core facility won’t tell you
Matching imaging technique to the biological question, from routine cameras to billion-pixel systems.
Columns, detectors, and the true cost per sample
Chromatography costed per sample rather than per instrument.
−80s, LN2, and monitoring systems that actually prevent sample loss
Storage, monitoring, and failure planning, written around the failure every lab has a story about.
Droplet, plate-based, and combinatorial indexing compared
The companion to our sequencing coverage, for labs choosing a single-cell workflow.
Imaging-based vs. sequencing-based spatial omics in 2026
The fastest-growing capital-equipment category in genomics.
From benchtop to 2,000 L
Scale-up decision points, and where single-use stops paying for itself.
The complete guide to buying second-hand without getting burned
Warranty, IQ/OQ/PQ qualification, and which instrument classes age well.
Analysers and sorters, from 4-colour to spectral
Detector configuration, panel design limits, and what spectral actually buys you.
Choosing between relative and absolute quantification
Where dPCR earns its premium, and where qPCR is still the right answer.
CO₂, tri-gas and hypoxia chambers compared
Contamination control, decontamination cycles, and real recovery times.
Absorbance, fluorescence, luminescence and multimode
Where monochromators beat filters, and when the multimode premium is wasted.
Type I, II and III systems and what your assay needs
Consumable cost over five years, and the specs that actually matter downstream.
Longer-form references written to be kept open on the bench or the desk rather than read once. Each is maintained and revised rather than dated, which suits sponsors who want sustained association with a discipline instead of a single launch moment.
Budgeting, procurement, staffing and compliance in one place
Written for the person who signs off the purchase order, not the one who runs the assay.
Pricing models, scheduling and cost recovery
Chargeback structures, utilisation targets, and justifying the next capital request.
Equipping a lab in the first twelve months
What to buy first, what to share, and what to defer until the second grant.
Data management plans, FAIR and funder mandates
Practical compliance with the NIH DMS policy and its European equivalents.
Protocols, provenance and electronic record discipline
What reviewers now expect to see, and the record-keeping habits that produce it.
Validating, documenting and defending model-assisted results
Where AI output needs human sign-off, and how to evidence it to a reviewer or auditor.
RFPs, service contracts and total cost of ownership
Building a specification vendors cannot dodge, and reading the service contract properly.
Our strongest beat, built out into evergreen references. Several are living documents, revised as the field moves rather than published once.
Comparing Google Co-Scientist, GPT-Rosalind, Claude Science, and the rest
Updated quarterly as the field moves.
How autonomous experimentation actually works — and what it costs to build one
Closed-loop design, robotic execution, and Bayesian optimisation, measured against real deployments.
Isomorphic, ESM, and the new drug design engines compared
What changed after AlphaFold 3, and which engines labs can actually use today.
Search, summarization, and systematic reviews in 2026
Tooling for literature search, summarisation, and systematic review.
A practical guide to AI agents that run instruments, plan experiments, and write protocols
For lab managers evaluating agentic software against real instrument workflows.
What the singularity debate means for the bench researcher
Recruitment, authorship, and the science-of-science question.
The definitive guide to the companies, platforms, and pipelines that matter
Platform- and tool-focused rather than investor-focused.
From CellProfiler to foundation models
A practical guide for core facilities, paired with the microscopy buyer’s guide.
A running timeline of frontier models entering the life sciences
A living document, revised on every major model launch.
When simulation replaces the experiment
Forward-looking, but grounded in the platforms doing it today.
Educational hubs that sit above the buyer’s guides — for readers still choosing a method, not yet an instrument.
The 2027 guide to gene editing tools — base, prime, bridge RNA, and RNA editing
The full editing toolbox, and how to choose between its parts.
Short-read vs. long-read vs. nanopore — and what comes after
The explainer that sits above our sequencing platform coverage.
Kits, magnetic beads, and automation compared
Extraction chemistries compared on yield, purity, and hands-on time.
The modern protein detection & quantification guide
ELISA, Simoa, Olink, and mass-spec proteomics, framed by sensitivity and plex.
A practical guide to leaving the monolayer behind
What it actually takes to move a lab off 2D culture.
ctDNA, CTCs, and the platforms competing to catch cancer early
Platform comparison for early-detection research.
ChIP, ATAC-seq, methylation sequencing, and the kits that power them
Assay selection and the reagent ecosystems behind each.
The state of tissue engineering, bioprinting, and synthetic biology in 2026
Connecting bioprinting, synthetic biology, and bioprosthetics into one picture.
For the people who run labs rather than run experiments: budgets, software, sustainability, and procurement.
The complete equipment checklist and budget (2026)
For new PIs and startup biotechs, with a costed equipment checklist.
Choosing lab software your team will actually use
Selection, migration cost, and what integration is worth in practice.
The evidence-based guide to cutting plastic, power, and −80 °C energy bills
Approached from the instrument side, with measured savings rather than pledges.
How to write equipment justifications and negotiate with instrument vendors
An honest look at vendor negotiation, written for PIs and lab managers.
The practice rather than the purchase — how labs plan, staff, and run automation once the instrument is on the bench. Companion to the automation buyer’s guide.
What to automate first, second, and never
Sequencing automation projects so each one funds the next.
What five, fifteen, and fifty thousand dollars actually buys
Three worked budgets, costed against real throughput gains.
Writing, validating, and sharing automated methods
Method transfer, validation, and the portability problem between platforms.
Connecting instruments, schedulers, LIMS, and data pipelines
Drivers, APIs, and the points where integration projects usually stall.
Staffing, training, and maintaining an automated lab
The people cost of automation — skills, service contracts, and downtime planning.
Funding, ownership, and infrastructure models that sit outside the grant-council system — assessed on what has actually been built.
What decentralized science actually is, and what it isn’t
A plain-language primer separating the mechanism from the marketing.
DAOs, retroactive funding, and prize models
What these mechanisms have actually funded, and what happened next.
IP-NFTs, data trusts, and licensing research outputs
Ownership models compared on control, liquidity, and legal standing.
Remote instruments, cloud labs, and distributed experiments
Cloud labs and remote instrumentation, costed against in-house capacity.
Provenance, preregistration, and verifiable research records
Where cryptographic provenance helps, and where it is theatre.
Where the work goes once it is finished: preprints, open access, peer review, and the economics underneath all three.
Servers, timing, and what posting first costs you
Server comparison, journal policies, and scoop risk in practice.
APCs, transformative agreements, and who actually pays
Article charges by publisher and funder mandate, with worked examples.
Open, post-publication, and publish-review-curate models compared
How each model works, and the evidence on whether it improves quality.
A decision framework for choosing a journal
Turnaround, acceptance rates, and fit, weighed against career incentives.
Drafting, review, detection, and disclosure
What journals now require you to declare, and which tools are permitted.
Reference and destination pages, maintained on a schedule rather than published once.
A ranked history drawn from twelve years of instrument coverage.
Every major instrument release, in one place
A living tracker, updated monthly.
The calendar is not closed. If the decision your buyers are making is not on it, propose it — topics get added between cycles, and a well-argued suggestion is the usual reason one appears.
On one question: do readers need it? A topic that survives that gets scheduled and researched like any other — and you get first refusal on the presenting slot.
We commission the topic, never the conclusion. A proposed piece carries the same independence as the rest of the calendar: we write it, and the verdict is ours.
Propose a TopicGuides anchor the year; these run continuously alongside them and can be layered onto any topic booking.
Product launch coverage and press distribution to an audience already reading launch news daily.
Dedicated and sponsored placements in the Labcritics newsletter, sent to an opted-in research audience.
Enhanced profiles in our companies, tools, and distributor directories — permanent, indexed, and linked from relevant guides.
The product directory goes further: it connects by API to whichever LIMS a lab runs, and matches your catalogue to the experiments they have planned.
Run-of-site and category-targeted display across news, reviews, and comparison pages.
Rates, formats, audience data, and past campaign case studies — everything you need to plan against this calendar.
Tell us which topic you want and we’ll come back with availability, rates, and the scope brief within one business day.
