What can currently be said about the impact of probiotic bacteria on the microbial balance at the moment? “They go in at one end of the digestive tract and come out the other, and hopefully something good happens along the way” is probably not too harsh a statement.
— Gerald Tannock , Probiotics: A Critical Review

Archive for April, 2008

NASA Astrobiology Assessment 2008

Monday, April 7th, 2008

From the National Academies Press comes the 2008 “Assessment of the NASA Astrobiology Institute” [1]. The Executive Summary section begins:

Astrobiology is a scientific discipline devoted to the study of life in the universe—its origins, evolution, distribution, and future. It brings together the physical and biological sciences to address some of the most fundamental questions of […]

Filed under: (M,R)-System, Relational Biology, Rosennean Complexity | No Comments »

Crick’s Central Dogma and Closed Causal Loops

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

A recent article in the Journal of Biology, entitled “Small changes, big results: evolution of morphological discontinuity in mammals” [1], discusses how significant phenotypic changes appear to often be the result of variations of gene expression due to regulatory controls, instead of as a direct result of the primary sequence per se of the DNA:

Rather […]

Filed under: (M,R)-System, Entailment, Relational Biology, Rosennean Complexity, Systems Biology | 3 Comments »