A journey from reductionist to systemic cell biology aboard the schooner Tara

نویسنده

  • Eric Karsenti
چکیده

In this essay I describe my personal journey from reductionist to systems cell biology and describe how this in turn led to a 3-year sea voyage to explore complex ocean communities. In describing this journey, I hope to convey some important principles that I gleaned along the way. I realized that cellular functions emerge from multiple molecular interactions and that new approaches borrowed from statistical physics are required to understand the emergence of such complex systems. Then I wondered how such interaction networks developed during evolution. Because life first evolved in the oceans, it became a natural thing to start looking at the small organisms that compose the plankton in the world's oceans, of which 98% are … individual cells-hence the Tara Oceans voyage, which finished on 31 March 2012 in Lorient, France, after a 60,000-mile around-the-world journey that collected more than 30,000 samples from 153 sampling stations.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Oceans of plastic waste

Net gain: The schooner Tara, on an expedition around the Mediterranean to monitor microplastic pollution, drags a so-called manta net to collect floating debris. (Photo © A. Deniaud Garcia Tara Expéditions.) The research vessel Tara, a schooner built for marine and polar research, spent seven months of the last year cruising the Mediterranean Sea on an expedition to collect an unglamorous mater...

متن کامل

Effects of Major Epigenetic Factors on Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

The pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is influenced by both genetic factors and epigenetic modifications; the latter is a result of exposure to various environmental factors. Epigenetic modifications affect gene expression and alter cellular functions without modifying the genomic sequences. CpG-DNA methylation, histone modifications, and miRNAs are the main epigenetic factors ...

متن کامل

Characteristics of Potential Protein Biomarkers Extracted with 10% TCA from Blood Serum of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and Multiple Myeloma Patients

Blood serum has been extensively explored as a source of the bio-markers [1, 2].  For concentration of minor protein(s) and depletion of abundant blood serum proteins a 2,2,2-trichloroacetic acid (TCA) precipitation procedure is frequently applied [3]. However, a significant amount of proteins may be present in the TCA extracts, and these proteins are often not studied.Recently, we have sh...

متن کامل

The making of Tara Oceans: funding blue skies research for our Blue Planet

T he Tara Oceans project emerged from an early romantic idea I had in 2000: organizing a sailing expedition in the wake of Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle to popularize Biology. The original concept was mostly educational and media-oriented. Many years later, in spring 2007, with the help of a few colleagues, a scientific dimension was added to the project, which was key to start motivating f...

متن کامل

Putting the systems back into systems biology.

In recent years the term "systems biology" has become widespread in the biological literature, but most of the papers in which these words appear have surprisingly little to do with older notions of biological systems: they often seem to imply little more than reductionist biology applied on a large scale, with a little attention to interactions between some of the components, but with minimal ...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره 23  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2012