At the dawn of a new revolution in life sciences

Life and evolution as physics

What is evolution and why does it exist in the biological, geophysical and technological realms — in short, everywhere? Why is there a time direction — a time arrow — in the changes we know are happening every moment and everywhere? Why is the present different than the past? These are questions of physics, about everything, not just biology. The answer is that nothing lives, flows and moves unless it is driven by power. Physics sheds light on the natural engines that produce the power destroyed by the flows, and on the free morphing that leads to flow architectures naturally and universally. There is a unifying tendency across all domains to evolve into flow configurations that provide greater access for movement. This tendency is expressed as the constructal law of evolutionary flow organization everywhere. Here I illustrate how this law of physics accounts for and unites the life and evolution phenomena throughout nature, animate and inanimate.

The biocommunication method: On the road to an integrative biology

Although molecular biology, genetics, and related special disciplines represent a large amount of empirical data, a practical method for the evaluation and overview of current knowledge is far from being realized. The main concepts and narratives in these fields have remained nearly the same for decades and the more recent empirical data concerning the role of noncoding RNAs and persistent viruses and their defectives do not fit into this scenario. A more innovative approach such as applied biocommunication theory could translate empirical data into a coherent perspective on the functions within and between biological organisms and arguably lead to a sustainable integrative biology.

Can subcellular organization be explained only by physical principles?

In a recent forum article, Dan Needleman and Jan Brugues argue that, despite the astonishing advances in cell biology, a fundamental understanding of even the most well-studied subcellular biological processes is lacking.¹ This lack of understanding is evidenced by our inability to make precise predictions of subcellular and cellular behaviors. They suggest that to achieve such an understanding, we need to apply a combination of quantitative experiments with new theoretical concepts and determine the physical principles of subcellular biological organization.¹ We discuss these issues and suggest that, besides biophysics, we need strong theoretical inputs from biocommunication theory in order to understand all the core agents of the cellular life and subcellular organization.

How to deduce and teach the logical and unambiguous answer, namely L = ∑C, to "What is Life?" using the principles of communication?

Is it possible to understand the very nature of 'Life' and 'Death' based on contemporary biology? The usual spontaneous reaction is: "No way. Life is far too complicated. It involves both material- and an immaterial dimensions, and this combination exceeds the capacities of the human brain." In this paper, a fully contrarian stand is taken. Indeed it will be shown that without invoking any unknown principle(s) unambiguous definitions can be logically deduced. The key? First ask the right questions. Next, thoroughly imbue contemporary biology with the principles of communication, including both its 'hardware' and its 'software' aspects. An integrative yet simple principle emerges saying that: 1. All living matter is invariably organized as sender-receiver compartments that incessantly handle and transfer information (= communicate); 2. The 'communicating compartment' is better suited to serve as universal unit of structure, function and evolution than 'the (prokaryotic) cell', the smallest such unit; 3. 'Living matter' versus 'non-living' are false opposites while 'still alive' and 'just not alive anymore' are true opposites; 4. 'Death' ensues when a given sender-receiver compartment irreversibly loses its ability to handle information at its highest level of compartmental organization; 5. The verb 'Life' (L) denotes nothing else than the total sum (∑) of all acts of communication (C) executed by a sender-receiver at all its levels of compartmental organization: L = ∑C; 6. Any act of communication is a problem-solving act; 6. Any Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) should have the definition of Life at its core.

Current advances in systems and integrative biology

Systems biology has gained a tremendous amount of interest in the last few years. This is partly due to the realization that traditional approaches focusing only on a few molecules at a time cannot describe the impact of aberrant or modulated molecular environments across a whole system. Furthermore, a hypothesis-driven study aims to prove or disprove its postulations, whereas a hypothesis-free systems approach can yield an unbiased and novel testable hypothesis as an end-result. This latter approach foregoes assumptions which predict how a biological system should react to an altered microenvironment within a cellular context, across a tissue or impacting on distant organs. Additionally, re-use of existing data by systematic data mining and re-stratification, one of the cornerstones of integrative systems biology, is also gaining attention. While tremendous efforts using a systems methodology have already yielded excellent results, it is apparent that a lack of suitable analytic tools and purpose-built databases poses a major bottleneck in applying a systematic workflow. This review addresses the current approaches used in systems analysis and obstacles often encountered in large-scale data analysis and integration which tend to go unnoticed, but have a direct impact on the final outcome of a systems approach. Its wide applicability, ranging from basic research, disease descriptors, pharmacological studies, to personalized medicine, makes this emerging approach well suited to address biological and medical questions where conventional methods are not ideal.

Life is more than a computer running DNA software

In his recent interview for the Guardian Craig Venter is elaborating about a household appliance for the future, Digital Biological Converter (DBC). Current prototype, which can produce DNA, is a box attached to the computer which receives DNA sequences over the internet to synthesize DNA; later in future also viruses, proteins, and living cells. This would help the household members to produce, e.g., insulin, virus vaccines or phages that fight antibiotic resistant bacteria. In more distant future, Craig Venter’s hope is that the DBC will generate living cells via so-called “Universal Recipient Cell”. This platform will allow digitally transformed genomes, downloaded from the internet, to form new cells fitted for the particular needs such as therapeutics, food, fuel or cleaning water. In contrast to this, the authors propose that DNA sequences of genomes do not represent 1:1 depictions of unequivocal coding structures such as genes. In light of the variety of epigenetic markings, DNA can store a multitude of further meanings hidden under the superficial grammar of nucleic acid sequences.