Biocommunication (science)

In the study of the biological sciences, biocommunication is any specific type of communication within (intraspecific) or between (interspecific) species of plants,animals, fungi, protozoa and microorganisms. Communication includes sign-mediated interactions following three levels of (syntactic, pragmatic and semantic) rules. Signs in most cases are chemical molecules (semiochemicals, but also tactile, or as in animals also visual and auditive. Biocommunication of animals may include vocalizations (as between competing bird species), or pheromone production (as between various species of insects), chemical signals between plants and animals (as in tannin production used by vascular plants to warn away insects), and chemically mediated communication between plants and within plants. Biocommunication of fungi demonstrates that mycelia communication integrates interspecific sign-mediated interactions between fungal organisms soil bacteria and plant root cells without which plant nutrition could not be organized.

Biocommunication theory may be considered to be a branch of biosemiotics. Whereas Biosemiotics studies the production and interpretation of signs and codes, biocommunication theory investigates concrete interactions mediated by signs. Accordingly, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of biocommunication processes are distinguished. Biocommunication specific to animals (animal communication) is considered a branch of zoosemiotics. The semiotic study of molecular genetics, can be considered a study of biocommunication at its most basic level. Current research demonstrated that genetic content arrangements in most cases are the result of competent natural genetic engineering and natural genome editing. According biocommunication theory this requires consortia of agents that edit genomes coherently with insertion/deletion capabilities. Additionally such agents must be capable of de novo generation of new nucleotide sequences and insertion in pre-existing (host)sequences without disturbing/destroying previous genetic content arrangements. This fundamentally contradicts former narratives in which genetic content arrangements resulted out of error replication events by chance and their selection.

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