BIOLOGY INTERNATIONAL 40: 28-30 Stress Response - Ecological and Developmental Connections

Living systems continuously interact with their environment, and many factors in the environment are not kind to the organisms. The entire biological history is a reflection of this incessant antagonism between the organism and its environment: the diversity of life forms is primarily the result of this dynamic conflict, which is perceived by the organisms or its cells as "stress." These stresses range from toxic and harmful chemicals generated from within or present in the environment, to physical factors, like various kinds of ionizing and nonionizing radiations, unphysiological temperatures, to emotional or neural stresses. All stressful situations may affect the Darwinian fitness and therefore, even the most primitive organisms have evolved means to protect themselves from such damaging stresses. A most remarkable feature of this dynamic interaction between the genome and the environment is the apparent monotony of the manner in which the genomes of very diverse organisms respond to situations which individual cells perceive as some kind of stress.