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Life = f(Environment, t)

From traditional wisdom to a New Biology Dogma — the framework proposed by our founder Yue Jeff Xu that unites NMT, imOmics and the Global imOme Project, and redefines how life sciences understand the relationship between life and its environment.

The Framework

Life as a function of environment and time

The state of a living system — its health, growth, disease, metabolism, stress — is a function of its environment and time:

  • L (Life) — the comprehensive state of the living system, a dynamic dependent variable.
  • E (Environment) — the full set of physical, chemical and biological factors acting on life.
  • t (Time) — life–environment interaction is fundamentally dynamic; history matters.
  • f — the complex, nonlinear, multilayered mechanism by which life senses environmental signals and regulates itself through exchanges of matter and energy.

Traced to the ancient Chinese wisdom of "Harmony between Heaven and Humanity" (天人合一), the framework calls for a shift in the life sciences — from the static "decoding" paradigm represented by genomics to a dynamic "regulation" paradigm based on real-time interaction. Because both life and environment are built from ions and molecules, their exchanges define the living boundary — Life as Environment — giving the formula its physicochemical foundation and giving birth to imOmics.

Environment E physical · chemical · biological factors Life L state at time t efflux influx f = the exchange of ions & molecules over time Life = f (Environment, t)
The imOme — the totality of ionic and molecular exchanges — is where the function f becomes measurable.
Reference: Xu, Y. J. (2025). Life = f(Environment, t): From Traditional Wisdom to a New Biology Dogma.
Extending the Central Dogma

The New Biology Dogma

Genetic information does not act on the world directly. Between protein and phenotype lies the imOme — the real-time ionic and molecular exchanges that bridge internal genetic instructions with external environmental interactions.

DNA RNA Protein imOme Phenotype

The imOme is the missing functional layer: dynamic, directional, and measurable only in living samples — exactly what NMT was built to do.

Engine 2 · The Scientific Language

imOmics — Ionic & Molecular Omics

Proposed by Yue 'Jeff' Xu at Plant Biology 2014 (Portland, Oregon), imOmics is the holistic study of ion and molecule exchanges between living (and non-living) matter and its environment. It is a functional omics: instead of static molecular inventories, it reads the dynamic fluxes at the life–environment interface — the value of the function f at a specific time and place.

Data Acquisition Layer

High-throughput aiNMT

AI-driven, high-throughput NMT platforms (such as AINMT300-YG and IMONMT700-YG) capture multi-species flux data across plates, samples and conditions.

Environmental Layer

ERP / PEP Recording

Environmental parameter recording (ERP/PEP) synchronizes temperature, light, pH, gravity and other variables with every flux measurement — environment and life in one dataset.

Modeling Layer

imFluxes.com Cloud + AI

The flux cloud provides standardized collection, storage, metadata association, visualization and AI-based omics analysis — turning flux streams into imOmics knowledge.

Engine 3 · The Global Initiative

GiP — The Global imOme Project

GiP deploys standardized, intelligent monitoring nodes worldwide to build a cross-species, cross-scale, cross-region dynamic database of life–environment interactions — and to move the life sciences from describing phenomena to predicting and regulating them.

Goal I

A paradigm shift

Move life science from describing phenomena to predicting and regulating living systems, based on real-time life–environment interaction data.

Goal II

New industries

Rebuild industrial ecosystems in precision medicine, smart agriculture and environmental governance — nurturing multi-billion-dollar emerging industry clusters.

Goal III

International standards

Establish technical, data and algorithmic standards for live functional testing — SOPs, certification and shared methodologies for the community.

GiP in action — application scenarios

  • Smart agriculture — rice salt-tolerance mechanisms (Na⁺ efflux / K⁺ uptake), nitrogen-use efficiency, stress-resistance breeding.
  • Precision medicine — real-time intraoperative tumor-margin H⁺ monitoring (Warburg effect), personalized chemotherapy.
  • Early warning — ultra-early Ca²⁺-signal alerts for Alzheimer's disease; coral-bleaching early warning.
  • Environmental governance — heavy-metal (Cd²⁺) pollution remediation and biomonitoring.

The Bio-imOmics Project (BiP) family

  • HiP — Human imOme Project
  • PiP — Plant imOme Project
  • MiP — Microbial imOme Project
  • TiP — Traditional Chinese Medicine imOme Project
  • PSiP — Plant Seed imOme Project
  • AiP — the abiotic counterpart, for non-living matter

Initiated by the NMT International Alliance; implemented with the Zhongguancun NMT Industrial Alliance.

Join GiP: research institutions, laboratories and industry partners interested in operating standardized monitoring nodes or contributing imOmics data are welcome to write to contact@youngerusa.com (subject: "Global imOme Project — Participation").