The very first task assigned by our Head of Department to the few of us setting up the molecular laboratory in the Department was to come up with a collective noun for molecular biologists. (His favourite being of principals) We came a lack up with a few suggestions, all of which had the nature of the field implicated, but none tickled the fancy of our Head of Dept. as much as his own: an investment of molecular biologists! This has since evolved along a predestined and unfortunate course (yes, we have been put into a box) to a of.., a strain drain of.., a leech of.., even a haemorrhage of..!! However, it is not the designation of the collective noun but the parts of it rather, which is the point in question here. Not one of the current users of the molecular laboratory would refer to him- or herself as a molecular biologist. This is not merely an issue of pedantry or semantics. The designatory correctness often indicates one's own understanding of what one really does and how one fits into a particular system. (Besides, that which we call a rose by any other name would serve to complicate). Sensu stricto, molecular means of pertaining to or composed of molecules. Molecular biology, however, has always been ill defined and is now used to describe "the branch of biology devoted to the study of the molecular nature of the gene and its biochemical reactions" (Brown, 1992). In the molecular laboratory, we use techniques commonly used in the discipline of molecular biology. Molecular techniques are merely tools in our respective fields.
I shall use some of the "molecular" projects within the mycology group of the Department to elaborate on the above point. Most of us in this group are mycologists working on the taxonomy, physiology or ecology of fungi and are therefore mycologists, or more specifically, albeit not necessarily more appropriately, fungal taxonomists, fungal physiologists or fungal ecologists.
Morphological characters are still most commonly used in the description of fungi and their subsequent classification. However, due to the insufficiency of useful morphological structures (e.g. reproductive structures) as well as the awareness of the unreliability of some of these structures (e.g. characters undergoing convergent evolution), the mycology group has been resorting to and exploring non-morphological characters to establish phylogenetic relationships, in the hope of constructing a more natural (not necessarily practical) classification system. This is in accord with Darwin's argument that "all true classification is genealogical" and that all classification systems "must be strictly genealogical in order to be natural" (Darwin, 1859). Some of these non-morphological characters are based on ontogeny (does it really recapitulate phylogeny?) while others involve molecular characters such as allozymes and DNA molecules. Here, molecular techniques are merely tools, means to an end. And an end it is which must be constantly kept in focus.
Not all fungi are amenable to in vitro culture. A relatively novel approach is to investigate the presence/abundance/diversity of fungal entities within a given ecological niche using molecular techniques. The mycology group is exploring the feasibility of this approach which has been proven to be useful in detecting non-culturable prokaryotes. Although DNA-based in vivo detection of specific fungal pathogens in plant host tissue is now well established, the development of detection and identification protocols for non-specific fungi in general is still at its incipient stage. The success of this approach will open up the opportunity of answering some fundamental mycological and ecological questions. Again, molecular techniques are being employed as tools.
The employment of molecular tools, in many regards, resembles that of statistical tools in many ecological studies. Ecologists do not usually refer to themselves as statisticians despite their expertise in this branch of mathematics.
So in the molecular lab, we are essentially a bunch of ecologists, mycologists, ichthyologists, botanists, microbiologists, taxonomists, geneticists, we even have a veterinary scientist among us... rather like a motley crew. There you go, how's that for a collective noun? A motley of "molecular biologists"!
References
Brown, T. A (1992). Genetics, a molecular approach. Second edition. Chapman & Hall, London
Darwin, C. (1859). The origin of species. In: The origin of species. (ed. G. Beer, 1996), Oxford University Press, Oxford
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