Bacteria are single-celled prokaryotes.
An amoeba is a single-celled eukaryote.
Cyanobacteria are multicellular prokaryotes.
Fungi are multicellular eukaryotes.

An organism (from Ancient Greek ὄργανον (órganon) 'instrument, implement, tool', and -ισμός (-ismós)) is any biological living system that functions as an individual life form.[1] All organisms are composed of cells.[1] The idea of organism is based on the concept of minimal functional unit of life. Three traits have been proposed to play the main role in qualification as an organism:

  • noncompartmentability – structure that cannot be divided without its functionality loss,[2]
  • individuality – the entity has simultaneous holding of genetic uniqueness, genetic homogeneity and autonomy,[3]
  • distinctness – genetic information has to maintain open-system (a cell).[4]

Organisms include multicellular animals, plants, and fungi; or unicellular microorganisms such as protists, bacteria, and archaea.[5] All types of organisms are capable of reproduction, growth and development, maintenance, and some degree of response to stimuli. Most multicellular organisms differentiate into specialized tissues and organs during their development.

In 2016, a set of 355 genes from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms from Earth was identified.

Etymology

The term "organism" (from Greek ὀργανισμός, organismos, from ὄργανον, organon, i.e. "instrument, implement, tool, organ of sense or apprehension")[6][7] first appeared in the English language in 1703 and took on its current definition by 1834 (Oxford English Dictionary). It is directly related to the term "organization". There is a long tradition of defining organisms as self-organizing beings, going back at least to Immanuel Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment.[8]

Definitions

An organism may be defined as an assembly of molecules functioning as a more or less stable whole that exhibits the properties of life. Dictionary definitions can be broad, using phrases such as "any living structure, such as a plant, animal, fungus or bacterium, capable of growth and reproduction".[9] Many definitions exclude viruses and possible synthetic non-organic life forms, as viruses are dependent on the biochemical machinery of a host cell for reproduction.[10] A superorganism is an organism consisting of many individuals working together as a single functional or social unit.[11]

There has been controversy about the best way to define the organism,[12] and from a philosophical point of view, whether such a definition is necessary.[13][14][15] Problematic cases include colonial organisms: for instance, a colony of eusocial insects fulfils criteria such as adaptive organisation and germ-soma specialisation.[16] If so, the same argument would include some mutualistic and sexual partnerships as organisms.[17] If group selection occurs, then a group could be viewed as a superorganism, optimized by group adaptation.[18] Another view is that attributes like autonomy, genetic homogeneity and genetic uniqueness should be examined separately rather than demanding that an organism should have all of them; if so, there are multiple dimensions to biological individuality, resulting in several types of organism.[19]

Other views include the idea that an individual is distinguished by its immune response, separating self from foreign;[20] that "anti-entropy", the ability to maintain order, is what distinguishes an organism;[21] or that Shannon's information theory can be used to identify organisms as capable of self-maintaining their information content.[4] Finally, it may be that the concept of the organism is inadequate in biology.[22]

Viruses

Viruses are not typically considered to be organisms because they are incapable of autonomous reproduction, growth or metabolism. Although viruses have a few enzymes and molecules like those in living organisms, they have no metabolism of their own; they cannot synthesize the organic compounds from which they are formed. In this sense, they are similar to inanimate matter.[23] Viruses have their own genes, and they evolve. Thus, an argument that viruses should be classed as living organisms is their ability to undergo evolution and replicate through self-assembly. However, some scientists argue that viruses neither evolve nor self-reproduce. Instead, viruses are evolved by their host cells, meaning that there was co-evolution of viruses and host cells. If host cells did not exist, viral evolution would be impossible. As for reproduction, viruses rely on hosts' machinery to replicate. The discovery of viruses with genes coding for energy metabolism and protein synthesis fuelled the debate about whether viruses are living organisms, but the genes have a cellular origin. Most likely, they were acquired through horizontal gene transfer from viral hosts.[23]

Ancestry

Precambrian stromatolites in the Siyeh Formation, Glacier National Park. In 2002, a paper in the scientific journal Nature suggested that these 3.5 Gya (billion years old) geological formations contain fossilized cyanobacteria microbes. This suggests they are evidence of one of the earliest known life forms on Earth.

There is strong evidence from genetics that all organisms have a common ancestor. In particular, every living cell makes use of nucleic acids as its genetic material, and uses the same twenty amino acids as the building blocks for proteins. All organisms use the same genetic code (with some extremely rare and minor deviations) to translate nucleic acid sequences into proteins. The universality of these traits strongly suggests common ancestry, because the selection of many of these traits seems arbitrary. Horizontal gene transfer makes it more difficult to study the last universal ancestor.[24] However, the universal use of the same genetic code, same nucleotides, and same amino acids makes the existence of such an ancestor overwhelmingly likely.[25] The first organisms were possibly anaerobic and thermophilic chemolithoautotrophs that evolved within inorganic compartments at geothermal environments.[26][27]

The last universal common ancestor is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend.[25] Thus, it is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. The last universal common ancestor lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago, in the Paleoarchean era.[28][29] In 2016, a set of 355 genes considered likely to derive directly from the last universal common ancestor was identified.[30][31]

Human intervention

Modern biotechnology is challenging traditional concepts of organisms and species. Cloning is the process of creating a new multicellular organism, genetically identical to another, with the potential of creating entirely new species of organisms. Cloning is the subject of ethical debate.[32][33][34]

In 2008, the J. Craig Venter Institute assembled a synthetic bacterial genome, Mycoplasma genitalium, by using recombination in yeast of 25 overlapping DNA fragments in a single step. The use of yeast recombination greatly simplifies the assembly of large DNA molecules from both synthetic and natural fragments.[35]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Mosby's Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing and Health Professions (10th ed.). St. Louis, Missouri: Elsevier. 2017. p. 1281. ISBN 978-0-3232-2205-1.
  2. ↑ Rosen, Robert (September 1958). "A relational theory of biological systems". The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. 20 (3): 245–260. doi:10.1007/BF02478302. ISSN 0007-4985.
  3. ↑ Santelices, Bernabé (April 1999). "How many kinds of individual are there?". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 14 (4): 152–155. doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(98)01519-5. PMID 10322523.
  4. 1 2 Piast, Radosław W. (June 2019). "Shannon's information, Bernal's biopoiesis and Bernoulli distribution as pillars for building a definition of life". Journal of Theoretical Biology. 470: 101–107. Bibcode:2019JThBi.470..101P. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2019.03.009. PMID 30876803. S2CID 80625250.
  5. ↑ Hine, R.S. (2008). A dictionary of biology (6th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 461. ISBN 978-0-19-920462-5.
  6. ↑ ὄργανον. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
  7. ↑ "organism". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  8. ↑ Kant I., Critique of Judgment: §64.
  9. ↑ "organism". Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (online ed.). 1999.
  10. ↑ "organism". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  11. ↑ Kelly, Kevin (1994). Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world. Boston: Addison-Wesley. pp. 98. ISBN 978-0-201-48340-6.
  12. ↑ Clarke, E. (2010). "The problem of biological individuality". Biological Theory. 5 (4): 312–325. doi:10.1162/BIOT_a_00068. S2CID 28501709.
  13. ↑ Pepper, J.W.; Herron, M.D. (November 2008). "Does biology need an organism concept?". Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. 83 (4): 621–627. doi:10.1111/j.1469-185X.2008.00057.x. PMID 18947335. S2CID 4942890.
  14. ↑ Wilson, R. (2007). "The biological notion of individual". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  15. ↑ Wilson, J. (2000). "Ontological butchery: organism concepts and biological generalizations". Philosophy of Science. 67: 301–311. doi:10.1086/392827. JSTOR 188676. S2CID 84168536.
  16. ↑ Folse III, H.J.; Roughgarden, J. (December 2010). "What is an individual organism? A multilevel selection perspective". The Quarterly Review of Biology. 85 (4): 447–472. doi:10.1086/656905. PMID 21243964. S2CID 19816447.
  17. ↑ Queller, D.C.; Strassmann, J.E. (November 2009). "Beyond society: the evolution of organismality". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences. 364 (1533): 3143–3155. doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0095. PMC 2781869. PMID 19805423.
  18. ↑ Gardner, A.; Grafen, A. (April 2009). "Capturing the superorganism: a formal theory of group adaptation". Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 22 (4): 659–671. doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2008.01681.x. PMID 19210588. S2CID 8413751.
  19. ↑ Santelices, B. (April 1999). "How many kinds of individual are there?". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 14 (4): 152–155. doi:10.1016/s0169-5347(98)01519-5. PMID 10322523.
  20. ↑ Pradeu, T. (2010). "What is an organism? An immunological answer". History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. 32 (2–3): 247–267. PMID 21162370.
  21. ↑ Longo, G.; Montévil, M. (2014). Perspectives on Organisms – Springer. Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35938-5. ISBN 978-3-642-35937-8. S2CID 27653540.
  22. ↑ Bateson, P. (February 2005). "The return of the whole organism". Journal of Biosciences. 30 (1): 31–39. doi:10.1007/BF02705148. PMID 15824439. S2CID 26656790.
  23. 1 2 Moreira, D.; López-García, P.N. (April 2009). "Ten reasons to exclude viruses from the tree of life". Nature Reviews. Microbiology. 7 (4): 306–311. doi:10.1038/nrmicro2108. PMID 19270719. S2CID 3907750.
  24. ↑ Doolittle, W.F. (February 2000). "Uprooting the tree of life" (PDF). Scientific American. 282 (2): 90–95. Bibcode:2000SciAm.282b..90D. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0200-90. PMID 10710791. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 September 2006.
  25. 1 2 Theobald, D.L. (May 2010). "A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry". Nature. 465 (7295): 219–222. Bibcode:2010Natur.465..219T. doi:10.1038/nature09014. PMID 20463738. S2CID 4422345.
  26. ↑ Weiss, Madeline C.; Sousa, Filipa L.; Mrnjavac, Natalia; Neukirchen, Sinje; Roettger, Mayo; Nelson-Sathi, Shijulal; Martin, William F. (August 2018). "The last universal common ancestor between ancient Earth chemistry and the onset of genetics". PLOS Genetics. 14 (8): e1007518. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1007518. PMC 6095482. PMID 30114187.
  27. ↑ Koonin, Eugene V.; Martin, William F. (December 2005). "On the origin of genomes and cells within inorganic compartments". Trends in Genetics. 21 (12): 647–654. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2005.09.006. PMC 7172762. PMID 16223546.
  28. ↑ Doolittle, W.F. (February 2000). "Uprooting the tree of life" (PDF). Scientific American. 282 (2): 90–95. Bibcode:2000SciAm.282b..90D. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0200-90. PMID 10710791. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 July 2011.
  29. ↑ Glansdorff, N.; Xu, Y; Labedan, B. (July 2008). "The last universal common ancestor: emergence, constitution and genetic legacy of an elusive forerunner". Biology Direct. 3: 29. doi:10.1186/1745-6150-3-29. PMC 2478661. PMID 18613974.
  30. ↑ Weiss, Madeline C.; Sousa, Filipa L.; Mrnjavac, Natalia; et al. (July 2016). "The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor". Nature Microbiology. 1 (9): 16116. doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.116. PMID 27562259. S2CID 2997255.
  31. ↑ Wade, Nicholas (25 July 2016). "Meet Luca, the Ancestor of All Living Things". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
  32. ↑ Pence, Gregory E. (1998). Who's Afraid of Human Cloning?. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-8476-8782-1. paperback and hardcover.
  33. ↑ "AAAS Statement on Human Cloning". Archived from the original on 11 September 2012. Retrieved 15 December 2013.
  34. ↑ McGee, G. (October 2011). "Primer on Ethics and Animal Cloning". American Institute of Biological Sciences. Archived from the original on 23 February 2013.
  35. ↑ Gibson, Daniel G.; Benders, Gwynedd A.; Axelroda, Kevin C. (December 2008). "One-step assembly in yeast of 25 overlapping DNA fragments to form a complete synthetic Mycoplasma genitalium genome". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 105 (51): 20404–20409. Bibcode:2008PNAS..10520404G. doi:10.1073/pnas.0811011106. PMC 2600582. PMID 19073939.
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