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EMBO reports 4, 10, 913 (2003)
doi:10.1038/sj.embor.embor945
Beyond the horizon
Marlies Otter-Nilsson & Holger Breithaupt
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During the past 150 years, biology has seen many revolutionary advances
and the development of technologies that have sparked new questions and
resulted in fresh insights. Advances in optics and lens-making brought great
improvements to light microscopy in the nineteenth century, which, in turn,
enabled biologists to observe life at the cellular level. The resulting
discovery of bacteria as disease-causing agents spawned the field of
microbiology and revolutionized medicine. The electron microscope, developed by
physicists, is now mainly used by biologists to study the structures and
processes that occur inside the cell, which has put cell biology at the
forefront of research. At the macro-level, the sequencing of whole genomes and
the use of powerful computers and sophisticated algorithms now enable
biologists to study life on a larger scale and have generated whole new fields
of research, such as genomics and proteomics.
But, in many ways, biology has stretched technology to its limits. Many
scientists have access to equipment and databases that allows them to test
ideas and produce a lot of information fairly quickly. This has produced a
flood of publications, but these do not necessarily provide major new insights
into how life works. Technologies, such as those used in genomics and
proteomics, are helpful in generating data, but the number of possibilities and
parameters in a given experiment are limited and so too, therefore, is our
horizon of thinking. We are somehow still at a 'textbook' level of
understanding, which blocks further leaps of intuition that are needed to
understand life and that could come from a fresh reassessment of the
information available.
What is needed in current biological research are completely new ways of
thinking to generate truly novel concepts. Some of these may be found with the
helping hand of scientists from other disciplines, who have a different
mind-set to biologists. Clearly, today's research is already becoming more
multidisciplinary—the collaboration of computer scientists and biologists
in bioinformatics being one example, and the fusion of molecular biology and
physics to develop new microscopy techniques being another. But these joint
ventures generally aim at improving existing technology and do not take a step
back to look at biology from a different angle.
A new perspective could arise from the 'king of scientific disciplines':
mathematics. For most biologists though, mathematics, and to some extent
physics, are just distant memories from their early days at university that,
apart from statistical methods, are rarely put to use. Nevertheless, the
editors of EMBO reports wish to encourage studies at the interface
between these two specialities—and others—because we feel that they
will become increasingly important. In this and upcoming issues, we will
therefore feature several scientific papers that venture into the unknown
territory between biology and the other sciences. As some of our referees
commented, they "surely will challenge the thinking of some of the
readers."
In this issue, Victor de Lorenzo and his co-authors (page 994) have applied mathematics to the problem of
environmental pollution and present new perspectives on the networks involved
in biodegradation. Clearly, pollution remains a major problem not only due to a
lack of will to gain control over our wasteful lifestyle, but also because of
insufficient global scientific insight. De Lorenzo et al. now take a
closer and more comprehensive look at whether microbes could actually do all
the 'dirty' work for us and have analysed how a network of organisms, enzymes
and (toxic) compounds actually interacts. The model they present here is based
on a systems-biology approach to explain how microbes deal with toxic
environmental pollutants.
Alisdair Fernie and his colleagues (this issue, page 989) also take a systematic approach to the
complex problem of whether and how transcript profiles correlate with metabolic
profiles. Our knowledge of transcription factors and, to some extent, entire
biochemical pathways has increased enormously, mainly thanks to genomics,
proteomics and the use of microscopy techniques that have yielded an
unprecedented amount of data. But these techniques cannot address the next
level of research, that is the linkage between the events at DNA level and the
ultimate biological consequences. Again, mathematical models could solve this
problem, and Fernie et al. have used such an approach to combine two
biological systems to identify candidate genes that alter metabolic
profiles.
A third paper by Matthias Weiss and co-workers (this issue,
page 1000) attempts to explain how proteins that
are bound to larger structures, such as vesicular membranes, travel within the
cell. Current techniques to analyse these events are either based on the
bleaching of fluorescently tagged molecules and measurement of the recovery
time of the fluorescent signal or on determining the inherent Brownian
movements of proteins. Weiss et al. compared the available methods using
an experimental model that specifically addresses the question of the binding
and the movement of individual proteins within and between cellular
compartments.
These are just a few examples of how biological research is increasingly
becoming interdisciplinary and how this can open up completely new fields of
research and vistas of understanding. These papers therefore should not only
challenge the reader but should also show that molecular biology today
comprises much more than the current disciplines usually defined by university
department and institute names. We hope that they will be as inspiring for our
readers as they were for the referees and the editors and that they will
encourage more such papers in which biology meets, challenges and learns from
other disciplines.
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