Bench to Na­ture, A Call to Mol­e­c­u­lar Bi­ol­o­gists

by Roberto

Along sev­eral decades my cu­rios­ity drove me from the com­fort of pu­ri­fied en­zymes to the com­plexity of plant root mi­cro­bial com­mu­ni­ties, along the way pass­ing through sta­tion­ary phase phy­siology, biofilms, in­ter­species in­ter­ac­tions, to men­tion but a few. All along, some­where hid­den in my sub­con­scious, was the de­sire to un­der­stand – at the mol­e­c­u­lar level – how life re­ally works. With every new step, I had the feel­ing that the new ap­proaches we used were get­ting us closer. Yet we were al­ways a ways away. Now, no longer in charge of run­ning a bench lab, I find my­self ever more fas­ci­nated by end­less ques­tions aris­ing from sim­ple ob­ser­va­tions of the nat­ural world, lichens on a branch, fun­gal fil­a­ments un­der a de­cay­ing log, the al­gal blooms at a lo­cal pond. As the world around me con­stantly changes, what mol­e­c­u­lar mech­a­nisms un­der­lie the adap­ta­tions that myr­iad species un­dergo to sur­vive? How does Na­ture re­ally work?

Photo Credit: Roberto Kolter

Thus, it should come as no sur­prise that Edith Heard's re­cent es­say, "Mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­o­gists: let's re­con­nect with na­ture" was beau­ti­ful mu­sic to my ears. In it Edith – the di­rec­­tor-gen­eral of the Eu­ro­pean Mol­e­c­u­lar Bi­ol­ogy Labora­tory (EMBL) in Hei­del­berg, Ger­many – makes sev­eral out­stand­ing points. First, she de­scribes the peren­nial lim­i­ta­tion of most mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­ogy. By fo­cus­ing on well-con­trolled la­boratory con­di­tions that per­mit study­ing sub­jects at the small­est of scales, we are in­evitably de­prived from the "ful­lest pic­ture." How life re­ally works at the mol­e­c­u­lar level has not been ex­plored fully in its nat­ural con­text. Sec­ond, she re­minds us of the many re­mark­able tools and in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary ap­proaches that have been de­vel­oped in mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­ogy and how these are just wait­ing to be taken out to na­ture to in­ves­ti­gate how liv­ing sys­tems be­have in an ever-chang­ing world. As a first step in putting this into prac­tice, the EMBL has launched a "Mole­cules to Ecosys­tems" pro­gram which promises to de­ploy state-of-the-art mo­bile labs to study di­verse ecosys­tems through­out Eu­rope. Third and most im­por­tantly, Edith's es­say makes a ge­neral call for bench sci­en­tists to step out of the lab to study how life re­ally works. I ap­plaud the es­say over­all and hope many mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­o­gists will fol­low this call. How's that for a New Year's res­o­lu­tion?

 

We apol­o­gize for the left-handed he­lix in the Fig­ure of the for­mer ver­sion.