However, this fact is routinely ignored in network analyses that seek to find connections among organisms by building a network in which nodes correspond to organisms, and edges correspond to pairs of organisms that are correlated.
Mark Blaxter School of Biological Sciences, The University of Edinburgh This is an interesting opinion piece that suggests 'upscaling' our genomics approaches on non-model organisms, and building ENCODE-like programmes to deliver 'systems biology' level understanding of a wider range of organisms than those currently studied.
Unfortunately, right now, building organisms is hard.
Modified organisms, capable of building an equivalent indirect co-operative loop as outlined above, would increase facilitation easily.
Costs are also falling in synthetic biology – the practice of extracting genes from one organism, or even building them from scratch, and inserting them into others to make organism do things not found in nature.
Reshma Shetty is a co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, an organism design company building organisms to spec for customers across markets including nutrition, health and consumer goods.
Though the overall concept originates in physiology and is far from novel, the present goal of these methods is progression to a cellular-level systems understanding, then to the organ level, and eventually to the organism level (Kitano 2002), building networks of interactions between molecules, cells, tissues, and organs to form a predictive view of an individual organism.
They have also allowed researchers to study evolution by building digital organisms.
When the organisms are alive and building themselves, they are using what's around them, and in doing so they're building the chemistry of the ocean into their own shells.
For those pioneering this new field, the science offers a whole realm of exhilarating possibilities - dreaming up and building new organisms that will perform exactly what's ordered.
