Addressing the challenges of 21st century biology requires integrating approaches and results across different subdisciplines of biology, such as genetics, development, physiology, ecology, and evolution, as well as technologies, information, and approaches from other disciplines, such as engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and the geological and atmospheric sciences (figure 1).

We need to be able to trace the effects of changes in DNA sequence or epigenetic regulation on multiple organismal phenotypes, understand how these changes affect ecological relationships, and have sufficient examples of these to begin to articulate new theories of organismal function and evolution. Scientists need to learn how complex biological systems work across levels of organization, from cells to ecosystems, and across time scales, from the millisecond response of neural systems to the long-term response of evolutionary change. This effort will involve analyses that span scales of time and space, from decoding information from genomes to extracting information from the environment on how organisms survive and reproduce (NRC 2009). To succeed in addressing the challenges of 21st century biology, scientists must generate, have access to, interpret, and archive more information than ever before.

The urgency of these fundamental and practical needs has prompted scientists to begin to identify sets of “grand challenges” in biology (Denver et al. Biology must also apply new and existing knowledge to solve the pressing problems of our times, which include the environmental crises of global climate change, ocean acidi- fication, biodiversity loss and the introduction of nonnative species, serious concerns for human health, emerging and pandemic diseases, and critical needs for agricultural and biofuel production.

We also urgently need to identify all the life forms on this planet and understand their interrelationships and geographic distributions. We need to understand the basic biological processes that drive life on this planet-those common to all organisms as well as those that provide unique adaptation to different environments. is confronted with the need to answer fundamental questions about how life and natural systems evolve, are governed, and respond to changing environments.

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