Interstitium aims to identify scientifically consequential relationships that remain insufficiently examined because they lie between established disciplines, analytical scales or explanatory frameworks.

Its publications bring together evidence that is often considered separately, examine assumptions that shape the interpretation of scientific problems and develop perspectives capable of generating clearer explanations and more discriminating research questions.

This may involve:

• reconsidering what has been treated as equivalent;
• distinguishing processes or states that have been grouped together;
• reconnecting findings studied at different levels of biological organisation;
• examining how context, transformation or variability alters an observed property;
• asking whether an apparent exception reveals a limitation in an established explanatory model;
• developing propositions that can be examined conceptually or tested empirically.

Interstitium does not pursue interdisciplinarity or conceptual novelty as ends in themselves. Connections across fields must be scientifically relevant, evidentially grounded and sufficiently precise to permit critical examination. The value of a new perspective lies in its capacity to clarify existing evidence, reveal a consequential distinction or make an underexamined relationship accessible to further investigation.

Scope

Interstitium is concerned primarily with the life sciences and with questions involving biological organisation, plant science, ecology, complex preparations and the relations between living systems and their environments.

Across these areas, particular attention is given to five recurring dimensions:

• organisation — how relations among components shape the properties of a system;
• context — how biological state, environment or experimental conditions influence an observed response;
• transformation — how cultivation, processing, preparation or exposure changes biological material and its effects;
• variability — how differences between organisms, materials, environments or methods affect scientific interpretation;
• interaction — how properties emerge through relations that cannot be understood adequately from isolated components alone.

The scope may extend from molecules and phytochemical matrices to organisms, ecological communities, food systems, human practices and theoretical models. Contributions may move between these levels where doing so addresses a clearly defined scientific problem.

Areas of Inquiry

Systems Biology & Organisational Biology

This area examines how biological function arises from relations among components, regulatory networks, structural constraints and interactions across different levels of organisation.

Relevant questions may concern molecular and physiological networks, emergent biological properties, adaptive regulation, system states or the limits of explanations based primarily on isolated components.

Phytochemistry & Phytopharmacology

This area explores how plant chemistry becomes biologically and pharmacologically meaningful through composition, proportion, extraction, preparation, transformation and biological context.

It includes work on medicinal plants, complex extracts, phytochemical variability, compound relations, preparation-dependent properties and the structural organisation of phytochemical systems. Particular attention is given to the space between chemical description and pharmacological explanation.

Ecology & Environmental Organisation

This area investigates how environmental conditions, ecological interactions and spatial or temporal organisation shape plant function, regeneration and adaptation.

Relevant subjects include seed dormancy and recruitment, disturbance, fire, water availability, soil–plant relations, ecological filtering, plant–microorganism interactions and the consequences of environmental variability for biological and phytochemical properties.

Food Systems & Exposome

This area considers food not merely as a collection of nutrients or compounds, but as part of a wider system involving biological origin, production, processing, preparation, exposure and individual response.

Contributions may examine food matrices, transformation processes, complex exposure patterns, environmental influences and the relations between dietary materials, physiology and health. The emphasis lies on connections that become obscured when food, environment and biological response are studied separately.

Human–Plant Interactions

This area examines the scientific significance of relationships between people and plants across medicinal, nutritional, ecological and cultural contexts.

It may include ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge, practices of preparation and use, observational traditions, plant selection and the ways in which human practices influence both biological materials and their interpretation. Traditional knowledge is approached neither as self-validating evidence nor merely as cultural background, but as a possible source of questions requiring historical, botanical and scientific examination.

Conceptual and Theoretical Work

Conceptual and theoretical work may contribute across all areas of inquiry. Interstitium provides space for models that connect findings across disciplines or levels of analysis, clarify neglected distinctions or propose new ways of organising an existing body of evidence.

Such work must remain accountable to the relevant literature. It should distinguish established findings from interpretation and hypothesis, identify its limitations and, wherever possible, lead to propositions that can be compared with evidence or investigated empirically.

Conceptual and theoretical work is therefore treated as a mode of scientific inquiry across the publication’s scope, rather than as a separate thematic field.

Publication Forms

Interstitium currently publishes contributions in three principal forms:

Scientific Essays develop evidence-grounded arguments around a defined scientific problem. They may connect findings ordinarily considered separately, question a consequential assumption or develop a new explanatory perspective.

Research Commentaries examine published studies, bodies of research or scientific debates. They focus on interpretation, implications, unresolved questions or relationships that may become visible when evidence is considered from another analytical perspective.

Responses engage directly with a Research Commentary published by Interstitium. They develop a focused, evidence-grounded reply that introduces additional evidence, alternative explanations or important distinctions to refine, challenge or extend the interpretation and advance the scientific question under discussion.

Additional formats may be introduced when they serve a genuine editorial purpose. Interstitium does not create publication categories solely in anticipation of future content.

Publication Boundaries

Interstitium does not currently operate as an independent venue for the formal peer review and first publication of original research articles. Research previously published in peer-reviewed journals may be presented, discussed or connected to the wider scientific programme of CRAI, with its original source and publication status stated clearly.

Contributions published directly by Interstitium undergo editorial assessment but are not described as externally peer reviewed unless an external review has actually taken place and is identified explicitly.

Work falls within the scope of Interstitium when it does more than summarise a topic or place different disciplines alongside one another. It must identify a meaningful scientific relationship, distinction or interpretive problem and develop it with sufficient evidential and conceptual precision to advance understanding or further inquiry.