The proportion of inventors and researchers who are at universities in the annual “Young Innovators Under 35” list, compiled by Technology Review, has shrunk, from 22 out of 35 in 2007 to 17 out of 35 this year.

Every year since 1999, the editors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology magazine create this list to praise young innovators whose inventions and research the editors find “most exciting” in fields such as medicine, electronics, and nanotechnology, among others.

The institution with the most researchers on the 2008 list is Harvard University, with four (plus a joint representative with MIT). The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology have two each. Researchers at three foreign universities, in Britain, Canada, and Israel, also appear on the list.

Some of the university-based projects that caught the attention of the editors at Technology Review include a quest to design microbes to make fuels and drugs, a miniature robotic fly, and an electronic nose that can diagnose cancer by sniffing the patient’s breath. —Maria José Viñas