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Unifying concepts of biological function from molecules to ecosystems

View ORCID ProfileKeith D Farnsworth, Larissa Albantakis, View ORCID ProfileTancredi Caruso
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/105320
Keith D Farnsworth
1Queen’s University Belfast. MBC. 97 Lisburn Road, Belfast BT97BL, UK.
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Larissa Albantakis
2Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison 53719, WI, USA.
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Tancredi Caruso
1Queen’s University Belfast. MBC. 97 Lisburn Road, Belfast BT97BL, UK.
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Abstract

The concept of function arises at all levels of biological study and is often loosely and variously defined, especially within ecology. This has led to ambiguity, obscuring the common structure that unites levels of biological organisation, from molecules to ecosystems. Here we build on already successful ideas from molecular biology and complexity theory to create a precise definition of biological function which spans scales of biological organisation and can be quantified in the unifying currency of biomass, enabling comparisons of functional effectiveness (irrespective of the specific function) across the field of ecology. We give precise definitions of ecological and ecosystem function that bring clarity and precision to studies of biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships and questions of ecological redundancy. To illustrate the new concepts and their unifying power, we construct a simple community-level model with nutrient cycling and animal-plant mutualism, emphasising the importance of its network structure in determining overall functioning. This type of network structure is that of an autocatalytic set of functional relationships, which also appears at biochemical, cellular and organism levels of organisation, creating a nested hierarchy. This enables a common and unifying concept of function to apply from molecular interaction networks up to the global ecosystem.

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Posted February 02, 2017.
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Unifying concepts of biological function from molecules to ecosystems
Keith D Farnsworth, Larissa Albantakis, Tancredi Caruso
bioRxiv 105320; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/105320
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Unifying concepts of biological function from molecules to ecosystems
Keith D Farnsworth, Larissa Albantakis, Tancredi Caruso
bioRxiv 105320; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/105320

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