A decade ago, when Uri Alon was almost finished with his physics PhD, picking up a genetics textéébook was just a way to avoid homework. "But when I opened it," he says, "it was like reading a thriller." What caught his attention? Gene regulation, the way cells control the production of proteins that turn genes on and off. The study of that process now has a name: systems biology.
Alon wrote software that hunts for patterns in the gene-regulation of the E. coli bacterium. What he found was astonishing: Networks with mechanisms straight out of engineering, including amplifiers and pulse generators that would be at home on a circuit board. Alon suspected that these recurring patterns, which he dubbed network motifs, may represent fundamental building blocks of all networks. "Evolution converges on this handful of circuit elements that it uses again and again," he says. He believes that scientists may eventually be able to construct complex networks - genetic or otherwise - out of these basic elements.
Alon's ideas caused some controversy. Last summer, Science abstracted a study criticizing his work, conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science outside Tel Aviv. A few peers suspect that Alon's findings may simply be software anomolies. But others are looking for network motifs in organisms beyond E. coli, and Alon, 36, is expanding his horizons. His software finds motifs in other networks, too - social, linguistic, even the Web. Pretty soon someone might have to rewrite that genetics textbook.
- David Shiga
credit:Elliot Haag
He sees networks: Uri Alon
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Cells Are Circuits, Too
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