Editorial
Editorial: Singularity Biology and Beyond
2024 Volume 21 Issue Supplemental Article ID: e211013
Details
2024 Volume 21 Issue Supplemental Article ID: e211013
Phenomena like the Big Bang, where “something is created originally from nothing,” and the surpassing of human intelligence by artificial intelligence, exemplify system-wide drastic changes. These are often caused by singularities, including phase singularity and technological singularity. Living systems display many examples of discontinuous, system-wide changes, such as the emergence of life from organic compounds in early evolution, and the sudden spread of pathogens in pandemics. These examples indicate that rare events in a few components can trigger significant changes across a complex system.
The Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Area “Singularity Biology” was initiated in the fiscal year (FY) 2018 and continued through FY 2022, spanning five years [1]. In this field, researchers from diverse disciplines, including bioimaging, protein engineering, systems biology, developmental biology, immunology, neuroscience, and more, have collaborated to study how rare cells, termed “singularity cells,” become singularities and impact the multicellular system. To understand how a “singularity cell” triggers widespread drastic changes in multicellular systems, we have been developing a trans-scale scope named “AMATERAS” [2]. This advanced imaging system can simultaneously observe over 1 million cells at subcellular spatial resolution, enabling detailed analysis for our research purposes. Additionally, joint research efforts have fostered collaborative networks among interdisciplinary researchers.
We are continuing to make AMATERAS fully automated in order to open its use to researchers around the world [3]. On the other hand, the amount of data obtained by AMATERAS ranges from gigabyte (GB) to terabyte (TB) per experiment, surpassing the control capabilities of an individual researcher. Therefore, we made a platform to integrate obtained data into the Systems Science of Biological Dynamics (SSBD) database, a RIKEN initiative designed for the comprehensive management of the massive image data, ensuring ease of reuse toward open science. In the future, we aim to standardize this database’s format and make it as accessible as the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) and Protein Data Bank of Japan (PDBJ) to promote open science.
For this special issue, we invited submissions primarily from the members of Scientific Research on Innovative Area “Singularity Biology”. We are pleased to present these insightful papers, aiming to spark interest among Biophysics and Physicobiology readers in transdisciplinary Singularity Biology studies.
