Integrative biology: linking levels of organization

Biological systems are composed of different levels of organization. Usually, one considers the atomic, molecular, cellular, individual, population. community and ecosystem levels. These levels of organization also correspond to different levels of observation of the system, from microscopic to macroscopic, i.e., to different time and space scales. The more microscopic the level is, the faster the time scale and the smaller the space scale are. The dynamics of the complete system is the result of the coupled dynamical processes that take place in each of its levels of organization at different time scales. Variables aggregation methods take advantage of these different time scales to reduce the dimension of mathematical models such as a system of ordinary differential equations. We are going to study the dynamics of a system which is hierarchically organized in the sense that it is composed of groups of elements that can be themselves divided into further smaller sub-groups and so on. The hierarchical structure of the system results from the fact that the intra-group, interactions are assumed to be larger than inter-group ones. We present aggregation methods that allow one to build a reduced model that governs a few global variables at the slow time scale. (C) 2003 Academie des sciences. Published by editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.