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Atom-first biology starts with elements, not organisms, traits, molecules, or nucleotides.
Treats biosystems (e.g., organelle, cell, population, community) as dynamical compositional systems.
Analyzes inorganic biochemical systems in the context of geochemical systems in which they are embedded.
Equal attention to numerator and denominator chemistry.
Quantifies the relative proportions of chemical elements in biological systems, from cells to lakes, to understand biology as an integrated compositional system at its lowest level of organization.
Elemental data are inherently compositional. Treating them as such allows us to connect detailed, often modular knowledge of individual elements to prediction of higher-order biological and ecological phenomena.
We call this elemental, rather than organismal, perspective atom-first biology.
Atom-first biology is not a new field. It is a reminder that imperceptible atom-scale processes shape biological systems at every scale.
Moreover, it is a call to leverage longstanding knowledge from inorganic chemistry and biophysical systems that has remained ancillary to mainstream biology.
The atom-first perspective of biology may be of relevance to: ecologists integrating across scales; physiologists interested in material constraints; toxicologists studying elemental interactions; statisticians analyzing compositional systems; and mathematicians seeking unifying (scale invariant) principles in biology.
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