Facts about Biology

Molecular biology is the study of biology at the molecular level.

Developmental biology involves study of life at the level of the development or ontogeny of an individual organism.

The word ology is thus misleading as the “o” is actually part of the word stem that receives the -logy ending, such as the bio part of biology.

Developmental biology studies the process by which organisms grow and develop.

Molecular biology chiefly concerns itself with understanding the interactions between the various systems of a cell, especially by mapping the interactions between DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis and learning how these interactions are regulated.

Biology, or "life science," offers a window into fundamental principles shared by living organisms.

Aspects of biology raising issues of bioethics include cloning, genetic engineering, population control, medical research on animals, creation of biological weapons, and so forth.

Appreciating the similarities and differences between cell types is particularly important to the fields of cell and molecular biology.

A speculative new field is astrobiology (or xenobiology) which examines the possibility of life beyond the Earth.

The field overlaps with other areas of biology, particularly genetics and biochemistry.

The word "biology" derives from Greek and is generally rendered as "study of life."

Among these are molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, physiology, anatomy, developmental biology, genetics, ecology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology.

Evolutionary biology is concerned with the origin and descent of species, and their change over time, i.e., their evolution.

Related fields which are often considered part of evolutionary biology are phylogenetics, systematics, and taxonomy.

The science of biology is central to this process.

Biology has become such a vast research enterprise that it is not generally studied as a single discipline, but as a number of clustered sub-disciplines.

Two broad disciplines within biology are botany, the study of plants, and zoology, the study of animals.

Originating in embryology, today, developmental biology studies the genetic control of cell growth, differentiation, and "morphogenesis," which is the process that gives rise to tissues, organs, and anatomy.

Biologists study life over a wide range of scales: Life is studied at the atomic and molecular scale in molecular biology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics.

The word "biology" in its modern sense seems to have been introduced independently by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (Biologie oder Philosophie der Lebenden Natur, 1802) and by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Hydrogйologie, 1802).

Widely varied approaches to biology generate information about phylogeny.

A central, organizing concept in biology is that all life has descended from a common origin through a process of evolution.

Cell biology researches both single-celled organisms like bacteria and specialized cells in multicellular organisms like humans.

Evolutionary biology is an inclusive field because it includes scientists from many traditional taxonomically oriented disciplines.

The suffix "-logy" is common in science, in such words as geology, ecology, zoology, paleontology, microbiology, and so forth.

Model organisms for developmental biology include the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the zebrafish Brachydanio rerio, the mouse Mus musculus, and the small flowering mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

The purview of biology extends from the origin of life to the fundamental nature of human beings and their relationship to all other forms of life.

The theme of “structure to function” is central to biology.

At the level of the cell, life is studied in cell biology, and at multicellular scales, it is examined in physiology, anatomy, and histology.

Changes over time, whether within populations (microevolution) or involving either speciation or the introduction of major designs (macroevolution), is part of the field of inquiry of evolutionary biology.

The common genetic and developmental mechanisms of animals and plants is studied in molecular biology, molecular genetics, and developmental biology.

Cell biology studies the physiological properties of cells, as well as their behaviors, interactions, and environment; this is done both on a microscopic and molecular level.