Puni Jeyasingh

Inspired by Alfred Lotka's work a century ago, and reinvogorated by bioinorganic chemistry and ecological stoichiometry in the post-genomic era, we frame biological systems as dynamical compositional systems governed by the relative proportions of chemical elements. Rather than beginning with organisms, traits, or genes, this perspective starts with elemental building blocks and treats biosystems, from cells to ecosystems, as material systems embedded within geochemical contexts. A central premise is that biological function and productivity are constrained not only by individual elements but by their joint, compositional dynamics, requiring equal attention to numerator and denominator chemistry.

By explicitly treating elemental data as compositional, atom-first biology connects mechanistic, element-specific knowledge to emergent biological and ecological outcomes across scales. This approach enables integration of inorganic chemistry, biophysics, physiology, and ecology within a unified quantitative framework, allowing predictions about growth, tolerance, productivity, and system-level responses to environmental change that are difficult to obtain using single-element or trait-centric approaches.

Atom-first biology does not propose a new discipline, but rather re-centers biology on well-established principles from inorganic chemistry and non-equilibrium biophysical systems that have historically remained siloed from mainstream biological inference. The framework is particularly relevant for interdisciplinary teams working at the interface of ecology, environmental chemistry, physiology, toxicology, statistics, and applied mathematics, where compositional constraints and scale-invariant material principles shape both data structure and biological outcomes.