Every time I read, hear or write the phrase “spatio-temporal” I cringe. It’s used frequently in developmental biology to convey the idea of measuring or studying something over both space and time. But it is an unusually awkward phrase, being an ugly sounding and looking hyphenation of a prefix “spatio” and adjective “temporal” that are rarely used on their own. There must be a better way to convey this concept. If not – we need to invent one. Ideas?
Michael Eisen
I'm an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. My research focuses on the evolution and population genomics of gene regulation in flies. I am also very interested in promoting various forms of open science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan.
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chronospace?
Four-dimensional?
Quad-dimensional?
One of the topics we covered in my undergrad genomics class was the Sea Urchin Endo16 regulatory circuit reverse engineered by the Davidson lab. As I recall, they demonstrated that the spatial and temporal variation in transcription factors were the inputs for logic gates controlling gene expression. Since then, the notion of a seemingly-deterministic spatiotemporal genomic “program” has stuck with me.
Your call for a new phrase has prompted me to review the concepts – and perhaps make a suggestion or two for a better phrase – in a multipart series of posts on my blog: http://has100ideas.com/idea/spatiotemporal-programming-1. Cheers!
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