Cornish-Bowden Athel, Cárdenas María Luz, Letelier Juan-Carlos, Soto-Andrade Jorge
Institut de Biologie Structurale et Microbiologie, Marseilles, France.
Proteomics. 2007 Mar;7(6):839-45. doi: 10.1002/pmic.200600431.
The definition of life has excited little interest among molecular biologists during the past half-century, and the enormous development in biology during that time has been largely based on an analytical approach in which all biological entities are studied in terms of their components, the process being extended to greater and greater detail without limit. The benefits of this reductionism are so obvious that they need no discussion, but there have been costs as well, and future advances, for example, for creating artificial life or for taking biotechnology beyond the level of tinkering, will need more serious attention to be given to the question of what makes a living organism living. According to Robert Rosen's theory of metabolism-replacement systems, the central idea missing from molecular biology is that of metabolic circularity, most evident from the obvious but commonly ignored fact that proteins are not given from outside but are products of metabolism, and thus metabolites. Among other consequences, this implies that the usual distinction between proteome and metabolome is conceptually artificial -- however useful it may be in practice -- as the proteome is part of the metabolome.
在过去的半个世纪里，生命的定义在分子生物学家中并未引起太多兴趣，而在此期间生物学的巨大发展很大程度上基于一种分析方法，即所有生物实体都依据其组成部分进行研究，这个过程不断细化，没有限度。这种还原论的益处显而易见，无需讨论，但也存在代价，例如，未来在创造人工生命或将生物技术提升到超越修修补补水平的进展，将需要更认真地关注是什么使生物体具有生命这一问题。根据罗伯特·罗森的代谢替代系统理论，分子生物学中缺失的核心概念是代谢循环，这一点从蛋白质并非外部给予而是代谢产物（即代谢物）这一明显却常被忽视的事实中最为明显地体现出来。这意味着蛋白质组和代谢组之间通常的区分在概念上是人为的——无论它在实践中可能多么有用——因为蛋白质组是代谢组的一部分。
