The multiple dimensions of Integrative Biology

It is an honor and a privilege to take the helm as Editor-in-Chief of Integrative Biology, with gratitude to Mina Bissell for her extraordinary leadership from the journal's inception and to the wonderful Associate Editors—David Beebe, Mary Helen Barcellos-Hoff, and John McCarthy—for their outstanding ongoing efforts in setting the technical and conceptual bars for the journal content. My aim going forward, in partnership with this splendid team along with our superb Advisory Board and Editorial Board, will be to further strengthen the singular contribution that iBiology can make in this “post-genomic” era.

What is this singular contribution? The notion of integration as centrally vital to bioscience—and bioengineering—in the 21st century is, in fact, emphasized in the 2009 National Academies report entitled ‘A New Biology for the 21st Century’ (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12764), for which I served as a co-author. But to be more explicit, there are multiple dimensions along which the analysis of biological questions must be pursued; these are illustrated in the accompanying figure, which was originally created by my colleague Peter Sorger at MIT early in the last decade.

One axis represents what I would term “horizontal integration” and is the most common view of the field of systems biology: that of moving from the study of individual components to that of multiple components concomitantly. This might focus on molecular machines, or pathways/circuits/networks at a minimal level of non-reductionist complexity, all the way to genome- (or transcriptome-, proteome-, metabolome-, etc.) wide extent. A second axis represents “vertical integration”, often associated with physiology (whether mammalian or microbial): that of moving from the study of system operation (phenotype, essentially) from the simplest contexts at the smallest space- and time-scales to more complex contexts involving larger space- and/or time-scales. In the mammalian realm, this integration may feature studies of cell-level behavior dependence on molecular properties, tissue/organ-level behavior dependence on cell properties, organism-level behavior dependence on tissue/organ properties, and population-level behavior dependence on organism properties; analogies exist in the microbial realm as well. Clearly, integrating across more than one of these spatiotemporal scale interfaces is an overarching goal, and the coupling of this kind of experimental study and computational modeling yields the swiftly-growing field of multi-scale modeling. A third axis represents ‘dynamic integration’, characterized by the depth or intensity of information addressed in measurement and modeling. This axis moves from sequence and structure at the most basic degrees, through thermodynamic information, to kinetic and transport information, to comprehensive dynamical systems operation at the most extreme degree. It thus may be considered to range from bioinformatics to biochemistry to biophysics, as one vein of characterization.

In my view, iBiology is seeking to encompass any to all of these three dimensions of integration—horizontal, vertical, and dynamic. It should be obvious why we are an inter-disciplinary journal, for no single discipline monolithically commands any of these dimensions. Our editorial policy request for each submitted manuscript to explicate the technical innovation and biological insights offered within, is aimed to emphasize the inherent likelihood that new methods are required to move along these dimensions and that new insights ought to be generated by doing so.

The keen need for, and valuable benefit arising from, integrative studies in bioscience and bioengineering may be widely appreciated throughout our various communities. But, there are precious few journals vigorously devoted to precisely this ‘New Biology’. Integrative Biology assuredly is one, and our aspiration is to make it the best.

D. A. Lauffenburger

Editor-in-Chief

---