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Biophysics to Ecology

  • Papers by the 2018 Winners of the Lomonosov Grand Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences
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Abstract

This report presents some new methodological opportunities that biophysics can offer for solving the fundamental problem of planetary ecology—deciphering the mechanism that maintains the equilibrium state of the biosphere. The Institute of Biophysics, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, where the author of this report works, is developing two complementary directions in ecological biophysics. The first is monitoring the vital activity of natural and constructed ecosystems by optical methods using the example of bioluminescence of the sea and closed ecosystems, and the second is studying the laws of parametric biosynthesis control and creating biotechnological control systems for these processes in order to construct noosphere-like ecosystems, in particular, for human life-support and survival systems in extreme conditions on the Earth and in space.

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Notes

  1. The glorious research vessel Vityaz, which had served its term (its name is imprinted on the pediment of the Institute of Oceanography in Monaco), thanks to the efforts of enthusiasts from Kaliningrad in 1992–1994. was renovated; it is currently the main exhibit of the Museum of the World Ocean.

  2. The Institute of Biophysics was founded in 1981 on the basis of the Department of Biophysics, which functioned as part of the Institute of Physics.

  3. The results of BIOS work were published in dozens of articles in the Russian and foreign scientific press and in two monographs [13, 14]; they aroused a keen professional interest and won government recognition of solving the problem.

  4. As an example, I would like to mention the curious story of the discovery of the pogonophore inhabiting the oases of life on the ocean floor around black smokers. (Both they and the associated centers of chemoautotrophic life independent of sunlight at the bottom of the oceans are perhaps the most amazing discovery of oceanologists, made relatively recently, in the middle of the 20th century.) Pogonophors are inhabitants of the oceanic depths, crowding around black smokers, which are hydrothermal springs of hot water enriched with restored compounds of hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, methane, etc. Pogonophors puzzled the zoologists who discovered them because of the absence of a digestive system. As it turned out, they live off the intracellular nutrition of bacterial symbionts cultivated at the pogonophore in the tentaculiform offshoots, which they extend into the hot streams erupted by smokers. These bacteria turned out to be chemoautotrophs, also including hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria. Apparently, these are the oldest life forms that arose and developed in the oceanic sunless depths long before the appearance of photosynthesis and the emergence of life to the light, to the sun, and then to land. Thus, the chemo-hydrogen biosynthesis which was to become a new promising tool for biotechnology had been invented by evolution billions of years before us and, apparently, prior to another, later discovery of evolution, photosynthesis, which opened the way to using solar energy for life on the earth. Helio-hydrogen biosynthesis opens up the prospect of combining the potentials of these two paths.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Biophysics, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

    I. I. Gitel’zon

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  1. I. I. Gitel’zon
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Correspondence to I. I. Gitel’zon.

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Translated by I. Pertsovskaya

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Gitel’zon, I.I. Biophysics to Ecology. Her. Russ. Acad. Sci. 89, 523–534 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331619060066

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331619060066

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