Marcello Barbieri (born 1940) is an Italian theoretical biologist at the

University of Ferrara The University of Ferrara () is the main university of the city of Ferrara in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. In the years prior to the First World War the University of Ferrara, with more than 500 students, was the best attended of ...

whose main interest is the origin of novelties in

macroevolution Macroevolution comprises the evolutionary processes and patterns which occur at and above the species level. In contrast, microevolution is evolution occurring within the population(s) of a single species. In other words, microevolution is the ...

. He has been one of founders and first editor-in-chief of the journal ''

Biosemiotics Biosemiotics (from the Ancient Greek, Greek βίος ''bios'', "life" and σημειωτικός ''sēmeiōtikos'', "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics (especially Neurosemiotics) and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-makin ...

'' until 2012; currently, he is an editor of the journal '' BioSystems''. His research field is code biology, the study of all codes of life from the

genetic code Genetic code is a set of rules used by living cell (biology), cells to Translation (biology), translate information encoded within genetic material (DNA or RNA sequences of nucleotide triplets or codons) into proteins. Translation is accomplished ...

to the codes of culture. His major books are ''The Semantic Theory of Evolution'' (1985),Barbieri M (1985) The Semantic Theory of Evolution. ''Harwood Academic Publishers'', New York ''The Organic Codes'' (2003),Barbieri M (2003) The Organic Codes. ''Cambridge University Press'', Cambridge, UK and ''Code Biology. A New Science of Life'' (2015).Barbieri M (2015) Code Biology. A New Science of Life. ''Springer'', Dordrecht

Career

Barbieri graduated in 1964 from the Science Faculty of

Bologna University The University of Bologna (, abbreviated Unibo) is a public research university in Bologna, Italy. Teaching began around 1088, with the university becoming organised as guilds of students () by the late 12th century. It is the oldest university ...

.Favareau D (ed) (2010). ''Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary''. Springer, Dordrecht, p. 751-755. ''Comments on Barbieri's work pp. 58-62'' In 1965, he was employed by the Medical Faculty of the same University as a researcher in

molecular biology Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecule, molecular basis of biological activity in and between Cell (biology), cells, including biomolecule, biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactio ...

and teacher of

biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations ...

for medical students. He conducted research at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...

in Bethesda, and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Berlin. Since 1992 he is professor of

embryology Embryology (from Ancient Greek, Greek ἔμβρυον, ''embryon'', "the unborn, embryo"; and -λογία, ''-logy, -logia'') is the branch of animal biology that studies the Prenatal development (biology), prenatal development of gametes (sex ...

at the Medical Faculty of Ferrara University. In 1997, he founded the Italian Association for Theoretical Biology (Associazione Italiana di Biologia Teorica) and in 2012 he founded the International Society of Code Biology.

Research

At the Max-Planck-Institut in Berlin, Barbieri obtained the largest microcrystals of eukaryotic

ribosome Ribosomes () are molecular machine, macromolecular machines, found within all cell (biology), cells, that perform Translation (biology), biological protein synthesis (messenger RNA translation). Ribosomes link amino acids together in the order s ...

s that have ever appeared in the scientific literature. At the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, and at the

in Bethesda, he developed mathematical models for the reconstruction of structures from incomplete information and has shown that a convergent increase in complexity is possible if the reconstructions are performed with iterative methods that make use of memories and codes. He has proposed that the existence of organic codes is revealed by the presence of adaptors and has shown that such codes exist in signal transduction, in the

cytoskeleton The cytoskeleton is a complex, dynamic network of interlinking protein filaments present in the cytoplasm of all cells, including those of bacteria and archaea. In eukaryotes, it extends from the cell nucleus to the cell membrane and is compos ...

and in cell compartments. This adaptor-dependent definition of code has been used by Kühn and Hofmeyr to show that the

histone code The histone code is a hypothesis that the transcription of genetic information encoded in DNA is in part regulated by chemical modifications (known as ''histone marks'') to histone proteins, primarily on their unstructured ends. Together with sim ...

is a true organic code, whereas Gérard Battail has argued that "Barbieri's organic codes enable error correction of genomes". He has been described as one of 'key figures' in

biosemiotics Biosemiotics (from the Ancient Greek, Greek βίος ''bios'', "life" and σημειωτικός ''sēmeiōtikos'', "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics (especially Neurosemiotics) and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-makin ...

by Donald Favareau in Essential Readings, by Liz Else in New Scientist and by Nigel Williams in ''Current Biology''.

Theoretical work

Barbieri underlined that copying and coding are two fundamentally different mechanisms of molecular change and suggested that there are two distinct mechanisms of evolutionary change: evolution by natural selection, based on copying, and evolution by natural conventions, based on coding. This in turn implies that many organic codes appeared in the history of life after the genetic code, and Barbieri proposed that the greatest novelties of

were associated with the origin of new codes. These ideas have been developed in the course of a thirty-year period in the books: ''The Semantic Theory of Evolution'' (1985), ''The Organic Codes'' (2003) and ''Code Biology'' (2015).

References

External links

Personal website

University of Ferrara profile

Code biology website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barbieri, Marcello 1940 births Living people Theoretical biologists Italian biologists Evolutionary biologists Systems biologists Italian molecular biologists