Call For Papers for the Special Issue, “Systems Plant Physiology: an integrated view of plants life”
摘要截稿:
全文截稿: 2018-09-30
影响因子: 2.175
期刊难度:
CCF分类: 无
中科院JCR分区:
• 大类 : 生物学 - 4区
• 小类 : 生化与分子生物学 - 4区
• 小类 : 生物物理 - 4区
Overview
Because of the limited capacity for movement, plants must deal with all sorts of environmental variation in their surroundings. As a result, their stability requires dynamic elements that confer some degree of organizational flexibility. To the set of possible changes in response to external stimuli that we call phenotypic plasticity. Therefore, there is a close correlation between the stability of a system and the plasticity of the phenotypic responses of a specific genotype. Notwithstanding, the environment triggers responses in the organism; the pattern of such responses is determined by the internal dynamics of the system itself. This internal dynamic is integrated into a complex metabolic network subject to rules of interactions. The rules that specify the interactions among the system components are performed using only local information, without reference to a pre-existing global pattern. In complex systems, such interactions are typically nonlinear processes based on negative and positive feedback loops. Negative feedback plays a crucial role in maintaining homeostasis of the system, whereas positive feedback operates by propagating and amplifying signals throughout the system. Both processes work together in the formation and stabilization of new patterns of organization, which makes the prediction of their global behaviour difficult. Such a dynamical process of organization operates throughout the different scales of the organization of the plants system, producing emergent properties non-reducible to its components at smaller scales of organization.
Another remarkable characteristic in plants, defining part of their own existence, is the modular structure of their bodies. A module can be considered as a biological entity (an individual, a structure, a process, or a pathway) characterized by more internal than external integration. Overall, modules can be considered as the nodes of networks that are connected via the edges (different modes of short and long-distance signalling). In hierarchical networks (such as any biological system), networks of finer scales can become nodes in networks of higher scales and so on. The response of a plant to its environment is the sum of all modular responses to their local conditions plus all interaction effects that are due to integration. In other words, the responses of plants to their environments are emergent properties. Emergence is the inevitable self-organized unfolding of new functions and structures of a system onto a higher scalar integrative level.
The exponential development of high-throughput technologies in the last decades, supporting and improving the OMICS science, has allowed successful uncovering of the complexity of the organizational network patterns in the cell’s metabolism to the plant phenome, thus creating the modern science of systems biology. Furthermore, the huge data sets and growing computational power have stimulated scientists to uncover how plants respond to the environmental changes, and how such knowledge could engender new technologies, for instance, to increase crop yields. Through these technologies, researchers are describing deeply the different hierarchical levels of plant organization, improving the possibility to predict the behaviour of the whole plant (phenome) based on extensive analysis of gene expression (genome and transcriptome) and/or metabolic networks (metabolome) to monitor and control cellular responses to genetic perturbation or environmental changes. However, different constrains can make this predictability difficult, challenging the bottom-up cause-effect approach that underpins the deterministic view of science based on an upward chain of causality. For instance, a main question is how to integrate, on one hand, the massive datasets from molecular high-throughput technologies and, on the other hand, the growing high-throughput information on the crop scale, i.e. plant phenomics, which is a typical problem of finding a proper general scaling law.
The importance of studying integration of different levels of biological organization relies on an ontological base: 1- spatial and temporal patterns are dependent on the scale of analysis, 2- there is more than one characteristic scale for the research, 3- experimental results cannot be directly transferred to larger scales, 4- biological interactions with the environment occur in multiple scales, and 5- environmental problems are created by the propagation of effects on different scales in the biosystem.
The goal of this Special Issue is to collect a series of reviews, opinions and original research articles, which focus on the challenge of integrating different scales of plant organization in order to understand the processes of plant development as well as the ability to survive facing all sort of environmental challenges. Therefore, manuscripts on the following topics, but not limited to, are welcome: integrated OMICS techniques, plant signalling, stress physiology, plant development regulation, plant-environmental interactions (with biotic and abiotic factors), mathematical and computational modelling, network approaches, theoretical biology.
For information on preparing manuscripts, please visit the Guide for authors athttps://www.elsevier.com/journals/progress-in-biophysics-and-molecular-biology/0079-6107/guide-for-authorsSubmissions not meeting these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits.