A Systems Approach to BioInspired Design

Dear Colleagues,

All organisms share similar biochemistry and physiology, so it comes as no surprise that they have evolved similar ways of adapting to the challenges of life. Evolution and increased complexity allow different versions of these mechanisms to be selected, but the underlying strategies remain more or less constant, and studies of comparative physiology are full of examples of this phenomenon. Such unification can simplify effective applications of biomimetics. For example, there is a negative correlation between the growth rate and biomass yield of a wide range of organisms, ranging from E. coli to cancer cells, such that when all nutrients and conditions are freely distributed, fast-growing organisms are favoured, whereas spatial structure and isolation selects for the evolution of slow-growing, high-yield, strategies. If one were to substitute food for energy or money (and they are all equivalent), then the model takes on a vastly wider meaning. Bachmann et al. demonstrated the overall negative impact of such a trade-off—in this case, on society when public goods are privatised—by using cultures of yeast cells to model the effect in their paper “Availability of public goods shapes the evolution of competing metabolic strategies”. See Capra’s keywords below for an insight into the nature of the transition at the systems level.

You are invited to submit research papers that conform to, or are inspired by, the view of both organisms and technology as hierarchies of systems, taking you from the scale of molecules to a global view. This approach has promise in that it can simplify bioinspired design and make it more productive, since the same essential mechanisms are often capable of being expressed at different levels of hierarchy, but with different applications. Your contribution can be practical, with preference given to accounts of successful projects or systematic processes, including description of any computer coding and details for access and the range of skills of the study’s contributors. Alternatively, it can also be theoretical, illustrating the adaptability applying basic biological mechanisms and the required transformations. You may find it useful to exemplify and illuminate the characteristics of systems-based thinking, listed below as keywords taken from Capra and Luisi’s book The Systems View of Life.

Prof. Dr. Julian F.V. Vincent
Guest Editor

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