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A Special Role for Marine Biology

The good news is that The Biological Bulletin’s new online editorial management system has made it much easier to submit manuscripts to the journal. Perhaps as an unintended consequence, however, we have gotten an influx of submissions that are frankly far outside the scope of The Biological Bulletin. Rather than explicitly define the scope of the journal, I thought it would be useful for potential authors if, from my perspective as editor, I clarified the special role that the field of marine biology plays within that scope.

Although The Biological Bulletin is a general-interest biology journal, it is indeed published by a pre-eminent marine biology laboratory (the MBL in Woods Hole) and in fact focuses mostly on reports that either study questions exclusive to marine biology or use marine biological model systems to approach more general questions in bioscience. This is not to say that the journal doesn’t also occasionally publish articles completely outside this arena. Examples of such eclecticism can be found in the August issue, where Jeffrey L. Krichmar and his colleagues reported on the effects of beta-catenin in hippocampal neurons (Krichmar et al., 2006) and in the October issue, where Ann B. Butler and Rodney M. J. Cotterill explored the question of consciousness in birds (Butler and Cotterill, 2006).

However, the subject of marine biology does have a special role at The Biological Bulletin—one that is deeply tied to the history of the journal and its publisher. As is well known, the impetus for a marine biology laboratory in Woods Hole arose (at least partly) out of its advantageous location for collecting an incredibly diverse number of marine species within a relatively compact geographic vicinity. Over the years, the journal co-evolved with its publisher, initially as a venue for publishing work based on the study of these marine organisms. As the MBL evolved into a world center for studying the larger questions of biology (but still often using marine models or within a marine context), so also the Bulletin evolved into a general-purpose biosciences publication. Nevertheless, from my viewpoint as editor, the scientific questions that abound in marine biology, writ large, often allow for elegant experiments that, through their results, provide deep insights into the fundamental questions about life: how it arose, evolved to be more complex, and came to interact in complex dynamics with the environment.

Let me provide several examples of what I am referring to above: first, with regard to the biology of eukaryotic sexual fertilization. Studies using marine model systems such as the sea urchin zygote have thrived because they provide large numbers of eggs and sperm (for biochemical studies), robust individual egg size (for physiology and imaging), and a built-in bioassay for assessing the effect of a manipulation on the viability of development (look for the healthy embryo) under extremely simple (artificial seawater) culture conditions. Furthermore, many of the key signal-transduction mechanisms in fertilization are also conserved across phylogeny.

Another wonderful example can be found in the early studies on conspecific cell-cell recognition in the sponge Microciona. These provided important clues that guided later studies on how these mechanisms worked in innate immunity, human autoimmune dysfunction, and the metastasis of cancer cells.

Finally, consider the neurons of Aplysia. Their characteristics—large and relatively easy to impale—facilitated studies that expanded our current understanding of the biophysical and biochemical mechanisms of learning and memory—an emergent phenomenon as important in humans as it is in the marine snail.

While the scope of the journal is constantly evolving, The Biological Bulletin is especially interested in work that studies marine organisms in ways that create new knowledge about the processes of life in general. In my opinion, the most fruitful areas for such research span multiple disciplines (e.g., biochemical metabolism in the milieu of deep-sea vents and astrobiology) and methodologies (e.g., optical imaging, laser microdissection, proteomics). Such transdisciplinary approaches that deploy the latest scientific techniques are often able to ask the sort of fundamental questions that we would like to publish.

So yes, marine biology has a special role at this journal, but especially within the larger context of the life sciences. And we are also interested in other studies in biosciences that similarly extend our knowledge of the complex adaptive system called biology.

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Olds, J. L. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Olds, J. L.