Academic Journal
A Minimal Framework for Describing Living Systems: A Multi-Dimensional View of Life Across Scales
| العنوان: | A Minimal Framework for Describing Living Systems: A Multi-Dimensional View of Life Across Scales |
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| المؤلفون: | Caetano-Anollés, Kelsey, Ewers, Brent, Iyer, Shilpa, Lucas, Jeffrey R, Pavlic, Theodore P, Seale, Andre P, Zeng, Yu |
| المساهمون: | National Science Foundation |
| المصدر: | Integrative and Comparative Biology ; volume 61, issue 6, page 2053-2065 ; ISSN 1540-7063 1557-7023 |
| بيانات النشر: | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
| سنة النشر: | 2021 |
| الوصف: | The almost limitless complexity of biology has led to two general approaches to understanding biological phenomena. One approach is dominated by reductionism in which high-level phenomena of whole systems are viewed as emerging from relatively simple and generally understood interactions at a substantially lower level. Although this approach is theoretically general, it can become intractable in practice when attempting to simultaneously explain a wide range of systems. A second approach is for specialists to investigate biological phenomena within one of many different hierarchical levels of description that are separated to decouple from concerns at other levels. Although this approach reduces the explanatory burden on specialists that operate within each level, it also reduces integration from insights gained at other levels. Thus, as beneficial as these approaches have been, they limit the scope and integration of knowledge across scales of biological organization to the detriment of a truly synoptic view of life. The challenge is to find a theoretical and experimental framework that facilitates a broader understanding of the hierarchy of life—providing permeability for the exchange of ideas among disciplinary specialists without discounting the peculiarities that have come to define those disciplines. For this purpose, coarse-grained, scale-invariant properties, and resources need to be identified that describe the characteristic features of a living system at all spatiotemporal scales. The approach will be aided by a common vernacular that underscores the realities of biological connections across a wide range of scales. Therefore, in this vision paper, we propose a conceptual approach based on four identified resources—energy, conductance, storage, and information (ECSI)—to reintegrate biological studies with the aim of unifying life sciences under resource limitations. We argue that no functional description of a living system is complete without accounting for at least all four of these ... |
| نوع الوثيقة: | article in journal/newspaper |
| اللغة: | English |
| DOI: | 10.1093/icb/icab172 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/icb/icab172/39830846/icab172.pdf |
| الاتاحة: | https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icab172 http://academic.oup.com/icb/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/icb/icab172/39830846/icab172.pdf https://academic.oup.com/icb/article-pdf/61/6/2053/42751304/icab172.pdf |
| Rights: | https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model |
| رقم الانضمام: | edsbas.60FD8B3E |
| قاعدة البيانات: | BASE |
| DOI: | 10.1093/icb/icab172 |
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