Darwin, nós temos um grande problema no dogma celular: entendendo o fluxo de informações na célula no sentido mais geral.

The cellular dogma

Stephen R. Quake 1,2  steve@czbiohub.org

1 The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Redwood City, CA, USA

2 Depts of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Image/Imagem

Abstract

In this essay, I will put forth what I see as a major conceptual challenge for biology in the next decade, one that is inspired by Crick’s Central Dogma: understanding information flow in the cell in the most general sense.

Main text

So genocentric has modern biology become that we have forgotten that the real units of function and structure in an organism are cells and not genes.—Sydney Brenner (2002)

Francis Crick devised the “Central Dogma” in trying to understand a particular problem: protein synthesis, and specifically the flow of information in protein synthesis.1 This great advance took place during the early days of the molecular biology revolution, when biologists were trying to understand the individual molecules of the cell and the principles by which they are created. Today, that program of discovering individual molecules is in many senses complete: the entire genomes of all major model organisms have been sequenced, more than 250 million genes from a much larger set of organisms have been discovered and sequenced, structures of 200,000 proteins derived from those genes have been experimentally determined, and reasonably good computational predictions exist for the structures of all remaining proteins.

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KLI Colloquia - Stuart A. Newman on Agency in the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellularity

KLI Colloquia

Agency in the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellularity

Stuart A. NEWMAN (New York Medical College)

2024-11-14 15:00 - 2024-11-14 16:30

KLI

Organized by KLI

To join the KLI Colloquia via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86548837670?pwd=AWm1v389npLyoJD5e01a9rjMXD7FP6.1

Meeting ID: 865 4883 7670

Passcode: 342640

Topic description / abstract:

This talk will present an interpretation of the evolution of multicellular organisms based on physical inherencies of cell aggregates and the conserved, intrinsic functionalities of cells. Focusing on the metazoans, it will describe how morphological motifs across all animal phyla – tissue layers and cavities, segments, appendages – are attractor states in morphospaces of cell clusters that arose with the appearance of clade-specific toolkit molecules such as classical cadherins, Wnt, and Notch. Further, the emergence of evolutionarily optional functionally differentiated cells and organs in the animals – e.g., muscle, liver, kidney – is based on partitioning and amplification of life-sustaining processes that at the cellular level are obligatory. This is accomplished by chromatin-based, enhancer-dependent gene co-expression machinery unique to metazoans. In contrast to the gradual generation of novel forms and functions postulated by adaptationist population biological models, this newer perspective suggests that novelties arising from these material and cellular inherencies come to characterize evolutionary lineages by serving as enablements for new kinds of organismal agency. This faculty, which pertains to all living systems, is the basis of niche selection and other creative capabilities that led Richard Lewontin to speak of the organism as subject, not just object, of evolution.

Biosketch:

Stuart A. Newman is a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, Valhalla, New York and a member of the External Faculty of the Konrad Lorenz Institute (KLI). His early scientific training was in chemistry, but he then moved into biology, both theoretical and experimental. He has contributed to several fields, including biophysical chemistry, embryonic morphogenesis, and evolutionary theory. His theoretical work includes a mechanism for patterning of the vertebrate limb skeleton based on the physics of self-organizing systems, and a physico-genetic framework for understanding the origination of animal body plans. His experimental work includes the characterization of the biophysical process of matrix-driven cell translocation and evidence for thermogenesis-related gene loss in the origin of birds. Newman has also written on ethical and societal issues related to research in developmental biology and was a founding member the Council for Responsible Genetics (Cambridge, Mass.). He has been a visiting scientist at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, the University of Tokyo, Komaba, Japan. He is editor of the KLI’s journal Biological Theory.