Post-Darwinian Biology

Systems biology and synthetic biology are interdisciplinary scientific approaches developed to improve the ability to understand, predict and control living systems. Both scientific areas capitalize on the production of large-scale data, both in the field of genomics and in a number of related fields, exploring new ways of cross-fertilization - starting both from traditional knowledge in biology - especially from the evolutionary one - articulated together with a series of theories and models coming from sciences such as physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry and engineering. Systems biology represents a predominantly cognitive scientific approach, while synthetic biology privileges the technical and technological approach, aiming at the creation of living systems, starting from existing biological material and its derivation, or even from non-biological materials, grafted onto living systems. The two approaches capitalize on epistemological orientations based on knowledge versus those based on applications, in other words on analysis versus synthesis as epistemic orientations. Philosophers of science, who examine technological research as a form of human practice, have argued for interdependence, but without a perfect overlap between understanding the functioning of a living system and designing a synthetic one, a distinction between basic and applied science being impossible in the context of biology synthetic.</em

Epistemological Approaches on Systemic and Synthetic Biology

The classical literature in the field of biology approaches the field of life from the perspective of the mechanisms by which the interactions between living systems are managed, while the systemic approach to biology emphasizes the interconnected networks of living nodes and the ways of communication of living systems, which is the very foundation of the idea of live as exchange of information on material or energetic support. More concretely, the emphasis on the informational dimension of biological interactions transfers the research object of synthetic biology from questions regarding the functionality of living systems, to those related to the ways of encoding information inside living structures that allow their configuration and reconfiguration in different evolutionary or constructive – in the case of synthetic biology – contexts. The analysis of the living system as a whole, from a structural-constructive perspective, takes from the systems theory a series of models for understanding the whole as something other than a simple aggregation of the component parts, emphasizing the integrity of the living system in a manner close to the systems approach in the science of complexity.</p

Heavy metal ions influence on conifer seeds germination and mitotic division

The seed biostructure presents a differential response of both at the biochemical action of manganese ions - the inhibition or stimulation of specific enzymatic reactions - as at the osmotic characteristics of seeds tegument, depending on the studied plant species. The analysis of the cytological slides showed increased values of the mitotic index (MI) at dilution 10-3 MnCl2 solution for larch (exposure time 48 hours) and 10-2 MnCl2 solution for spruce (exposure time 21 days)