System Biology & AI for Sustainable Environment: A Quest
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.” M.K. Gandhi
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Nature has been declining in at unprecedented rates and the debate between environment and development is not a very new one. Despite the steps taken to conserve nature and natural resources, the global goal in this regard is still become fancy science. The different issues like change in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and extinction of biodiversity have aggravated the intensity of problem. Sustainable development is the core concept adopted by UNESCO in order to achieve sustainability in the different socio-economic attributes. The 2030 Agenda for sustainable development has shared a blueprint to ensure peace and prosperity for the people and the blue planet by giving emphasize for the different 17 domains (17SDGs) of the earth and its people. No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Good Health & well-being, Good education, Gender equality, Sustainable cities & Communities, Climate Action, and Life below water are some of the issues that are being addressed by the ongoing movement as patronized by the world body. Before exploring the beauty of the issue, let me clarify the matter of sustainability from a bird’s eye view. Sustainability urges of fulfilling the needs of present generations without compromising the needs of forthcoming generations while ensuring a balance between economic growth, environmental care and social well-being. 456 million years earth has been experiencing a lot of changes since its inception of journey as one of the important planets of the solar system. The collision of particles of dust and gas formed larger clumps and these clumps gradually grew bigger and bigger eventually forming the earth. The heavy iron by naturally sank to the centre and the lighter silicates as usual rose to the surface. Parts of the continental crust may be older than four billion years old. The rocks of the crust convey the mirror of the transformation of this blue planet. Differentiation, cratering, flooding and surface evolution made the road of the formation of the earth’s surface and no atmosphere of the earth transformed into an atmosphere containing the earth’s surface. About 1.5 billion years ago, oxygen first accumulated on the earth’s surface and about 700 million years ago, the first single-celled life appeared. The story of life, perpetuation, and gradual complexity both in the structural and functional attributes grew. About 0.13 million years ago, the first modern humans appeared. During the long journey, the continuous changes of the earth’s surface have been taken into account from the Precambrian era to the Cenozoic era via a number of climatological changes succeeding one group of plants and animals by another with the passage of time. Over the last half-billion years, there have been several extinctions that enabled the dramatic contraction of the diversity of life on the blue planet. The occurrences of major geologic events and the appearance and disappearance of significant life forms are the main highlights of the evolution of the past in the remote past. Since the inception of the agrarian civilization with the domestication of plants and animals, the earth has experienced a number of changes. The onset of the industrial revolution has expedited a number of toxicity and this is enough to destabilize the natural cycles irrespective of its nature for replenishment and renewal of the different components of the earth surface. The contemporary research publications are enough to portray the grim and yellow destiny of the earth. The global temperature of the earth has increased by 1.1 ℃ since 1880.A.D.The year 2022 was the warmest year on record. The potential threat of the indiscriminate use of the different pesticides in general and DDT in particular has been documented in the title” Silent Spring” by American Environmentalist, Rachel Carson. Thus, environmental sustainability is one of civilization’s historic challenges and it needs the interactions of microbes and the different ecosystems along with the creation of sustainable tools and strategies. These tools are earnestly needed to address the hidden challenges due to the manipulation of the environment by human to meet the sky-skipping greed of the growing civilization in the 21st century. The fragile ecosystem is not merely the luminance of the glossary but it has a long impact on the ecology and environment in the context of sustainability. Global warming and greenhouse problems, acidification of the different ecosystems, the vulnerability of the different flora and fauna as reflected in the list of red data book, the ever-decreasing global net productivity, habitat destruction and degradation are some of the most coveted issues in this regard. Attempts have been taken into account to address the problems in very fragmented approaches and holistic measures are yet to be designed to solve this ever-growing crisis. The most unfortunate thing is that the community and ecosystem ecology has hindered progress in linking structure to function with most studies to date being compartmentalized into one or another approach. Systems biology is a holistic approach to the study of the interlocking parts of the natural world by the combined interaction among microbes, plants, animals and the other components including the human population along with other ecosystems in this endeavor. It mainly expedites the thought of how the different living organisms interact at many different scales. For example, if the human man is a system, it includes the different organs, tissues, cells and obviously the molecules they are made of as well as other micro flora that play very intangible roles lying in our skin and the digestive tract. System biology mainly uses computational and mathematical analysis with the help of millions of databases that include metagenomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics. The advent of Next Generation sequencing (NGS) in the domain of molecular biology can open the black box of microbial ecology that can play a very unique role in this regard. The use of molecular biology and whole community approaches can offer exciting new Ways to mitigate structure and function, along with their ecology and evolution. Truly understanding ecosystem functioning is necessary to view a system across the different levels of origination. The molecules are used by the individual consumer and the producer and the specific genes harbored within the individual facilitate the usage and the species population within the community. It carries these capabilities through the manifestation of the processes at the ecosystem level. It does not only require understanding the usage but also there is a need for an analysis of the concerned systems that can integrate across all levels. Further, the ecosystem processes different socio-economic ‘goods and services’ that have immense value to the human population. The supply of clean and potable drinking water, maintenance of the atmosphere with the optimization of the desired components in the inhalation, and the provision of desired medicines with tolerable side –effects are some of the criteria for the sustainability of the human race. A sustainable environment can address the aforesaid needs of the growing population. You cannot resist industrialization as it is the call of the time to meet the growing needs of the country irrespective of its GDP. The conflict is there and the dichotomy of industrialization and the purity of the environment are other important issues. Systems biology encompasses the idea of thinking about the issue in a very holistic manner and addressing all the problems in a very wider approach at the grass root level accommodating the knowledge from the micro-molecular level to the highest level of hierarchy with the advent of the uses all sophisticated methodologies garnished with computational and mathematical analytical viewpoints. In systems biology, the ‘reductionist’ approach is discouraged by the ‘holistic’ approaches to understanding the integrated network of cellular diversity with the non-living counterparts. The quantitative and qualitative data and their assessment through computational and mathematical modeling garnished with AI can be done to make biology a predictive science to explore the issuers and concerns of the global threat to the environment. The object of environmental sustainability is to balance ecological, economic and social goals and the systems biology can radiate the hope to bring the rainbow for a sustainable future by the holistic understanding of the different domains of life in a very fine networks. Let the concept of ‘Vasudhaiva kutumbakom’ voice the concept of ‘One Earth but millions Happiness’.
