How Genomes Emerge, Function, and Evolve: Living Systems Emergence-Genotype-Phenotype-Multilism-Genome/Systems Ecology.

Abstract

What holds together the world in its innermost, what life is, how it emerges, functions, and evolves, has not only been an epic matter of endless romantic sunset poetry and philosophy, but also manifests explicitly in its perhaps most central organization unit-genomes. Their 3D architecture and dynamics, including the interaction networks of regulatory elements, obviously co-evolved as inseparable systems allowing the physical storage, expression, and replication of genetic information. Since we were able to fill finally the much-debated centennial gaps in their 3D architecture and dynamics, now entire new perspectives open beyond epigenetics reaching as far as a general understanding of living systems: besides the previously known DNA double helix and nucleosome structure, the latter compact into a chromatin quasi-fibre folded into stable loops forming stable multi-loop aggregates/rosettes connected by linkers, creating hence the again already known chromosome arms and entire chromosomes forming the cell nucleus. Instantly and for the first time this leads now to a consistent and cross-proven systems statistical mechanics genomics framework elucidating genome intrinsic function and regulation including various components. It balances stability/flexibility ensuring genome integrity, enabling expression/regulation of genetic information, as well as genome replication/spread. Furthermore, genotype and phenotype are multiplisticly entangled being evolutionarily the outcome of both Darwinian natural selection and Lamarckian self-referenced manipulation-all embedded in even broader genome ecology (autopoietic) i(!)n- and environmental scopes. This allows formulating new meta-level functional semantics of genomics, i.e. notions as communication of genes, genomes, and information networks, architectural and dynamic spaces for creativity and innovation, or genomes as central geno-/phenotype entanglements. Beyond and most fundamentally, the paradoxical-seeming local equilibrium substance stability in its entity though far from a universal heat-death-like equilibrium is solved, and system irreversibility, time directionality, and thus the emergence of existence are clarified. Consequently, real deep understandings of genomes, life, and complex systems in general appear in evolutionary perspectives as well as from systems analyses, via system damage/disease (its repair/cure and manipulation) as far as the understanding of extraterrestrial life, the de novo creation and thus artificial life, and even the raison d'etre.