The Core of Biology

 Biology 101:

Biology, biological sciences, and life sciences, all refer to the same thing: the science of living organisms. By living organisms we mean entities that are:
  • comprised of one or more cells
  • have structural complexity at multiple levels of hierarchy
  • exchange materials and energy with their environment
  • can respond to changes in their environment
  • can reproduce themselves
One thing that confuses a lot of fresh students is that people tend to think that Biology is a theoretical science, full of 'facts and figures'. Biology is a highly conceptual and experimental science. In this blog series, I shall try to elaborate on these.
We want to understand the biological function in biology. The core of biology is understanding what a gene is, what the corresponding protein is, and how they can contribute to biological function. Here is an illustration to put that into perspective.
The Core of Biology


This specifies three major pipelines of study in biology:
  1. Genetics: From Genes to Biological Function
  2. Biochemistry: From Protein structure to function to mechanisms
  3. Molecular and Cell Biology: From Genes to Proteins; how genes express proteins in cells that determine the biological function in the context of cells.
The unity of biology lies in the core principles of the existence of genes, their expression (proteins) and the mechanisms that originate from those to depict specific biological phenomena, henceforth called the phenotype. Molecular Biology that deals majorly with "Gene-->Protein" part of the above triangle, is a modern science. The research in biology is at the molecular frontier.
Methods in biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology give rise to applied biology, which is biotechnology. So, in perspective, the modern biotechnology field is just "methods in molecular biology", and we shall get to that later in advanced pages in this blog.

To Open Science

This blog has been created in the name of open access. In most of the cases, I'll try my best to provide free resources in my future posts. For now, you can explore the open access textbooks at LibreTexts.

Important Introductory Resources:

3. Campbell Biology 12e, Campbell Biology is a staple of introductory biology texts for university level, and the best AP Biology textbook out there. If you don't have access to its print form, you can download this from plenty of places on the web. If you need high quality version, I might provide that sometime in the future.
4. https://www.britannica.com/science/biology
5. https://openstax.org/details/books/biology-2e


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