Hi everybody,

I realize this is an unusual question for this forum, but I though this would nevertheless be the right place to ask. I am starting a sentence with "Integrative transcriptomics" and want to say reveal or reveals after that. The ...omics words can generally be used in singular or plural meaning, but I am not a native speaker, so I am not certain which is better in this case. I am leaning towards the plural form, i.e. "Integrative transcriptomics reveal ...", but this is purely gut feeling. Also, the sentence refers to multiple transcriptomic methods, so this adds to my plural "feel".

Any opinions? Can I freely choose, or is there something else to consider?

Thanks! Sebastian

"Genetics", "bioinformatics", "genomics", "proteomics" and "transcriptomics" are all treated as uncountable nouns in English, so you should choose the verb as if they were singular. For example, Comparative genomics reveals insights into avian genome evolution (Science, 2014):

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1311

It is the same as for other uncountable nouns like "water", "money", "beer", "politics" or "economics". In English we say "money reveals the heart" and "beer solves all problems". It is said that the word "genomics" was coined by an American over a beer, so perhaps there is a moral in that.

By contrast, "methods" are countable so we would say "Several methods for comparative genomics reveal ..."

English is a fluid thing though and you will find some examples in the literature of where one or more of the "omics" words are treated as plural, but this usage is in the minority.