Can Genes Explain Biological Complexity?

大量基因组已经被测定，人们发现生物复杂性的程度并不线性依赖于基因数目的多少，更为复杂的是基因之间的相互作用、基因调控机制的复杂性、蛋白的翻译后修饰方式的多样性等等，发表在近期science上的文章对此做了很好的综述，并且提出将其他学科如生态研究中常用的网络模型引入此类研究当中。

Eörs Szathmáry, Ferenc Jordán, Csaba Pál^*

When it comes to the complexity of organisms we immediately think of behavioral or morphological complexity or perhaps wish to count the number of cells in an organism or the number of genes in the organism's genome. As Szathmáry et al. explain in their Perspective, biological complexity is not that simple. With the completed sequences of yeast, worm, fly, and human at hand, it is now clear that the number of genes cannot account for the complexity of organisms (the fly genome has about 25,000 genes and we only have about 35,000). The Perspective authors discuss whether we should think about complexity in terms of interactions among gene-regulation networks, using equations similar to those used by ecologists to determine the multitudinous interactions within food webs.