New Frontiers for Organismal Biology The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters

Understanding how complex organisms function and interact as integrated units with their environment is a long-standing challenge in biology. To address this challenge, organismal biology aims to reveal general organizing principles of physiological systems and behavior—in particular, in complex multicellular animals. Organismal biology also focuses on the role of individual variability in the evolutionary maintenance of diversity. To broadly advance these frontiers, cross-compatibility of experimental designs, methodological approaches, and data interpretation pipelines represents a key prerequisite. It is now possible to rapidly and systematically analyze complete genomes to elucidate genetic variation associated with traits and conditions that define individuals, populations, and species. However, genetic variation alone does not explain the varied individual physiology and behavior of complex organisms. We propose that such emergent properties of complex organisms can best be explained through a renewed emphasis on the context and life-history dependence of individual phenotypes as a to complement genetic data. diversity of complex organisms a new perspective. Research on how the phenotypes of complex organisms as a result of gene–environment interactions has great to reveal novel

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