A feeling for the numbers in biology
A feeling for the numbers in biology
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.0907732106
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发表时间：
2009-12-22
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Milo, Ron
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Phillips, Rob;Milo, Ron
虽然生物系统的定量描述已经持续了几个世纪，但最近在测量从新陈代谢到基因表达到信号转导等现象方面的进展导致了对生物计算的新重视。这篇文章描述了两种不同的生物数方法的汇合。首先，一系列令人印象深刻的定量测量使人们有可能发展对生物数字的直觉，从每年在光合作用过程中固定多少亿吨大气碳到为快速分裂的大肠杆菌细胞提供糖所需的膜转运蛋白的数量。由于大量的定量数据，BioNumbers网站最近被开发为数字生物学的知识库。第二，物理科学中常见的、在所谓的“费米问题”中被奉为经典的数值估计的互补和强大传统，要求人们努力根据物理学和化学中的一些基本事实和简单想法来估计关键的生物量。在这篇文章中，我们描述了这两种方法，并在几个特别有吸引力的案例研究中说明了它们的协同作用。这些案例研究揭示了强调数字对重要生物学问题的影响。
Although the quantitative description of biological systems has been going on for centuries, recent advances in the measurement of phenomena ranging from metabolism to gene expression to signal transduction have resulted in a new emphasis on biological numeracy. This article describes the confluence of two different approaches to biological numbers. First, an impressive array of quantitative measurements make it possible to develop intuition about biological numbers ranging from how many gigatons of atmospheric carbon are fixed every year in the process of photosynthesis to the number of membrane transporters needed to provide sugars to rapidly dividing Escherichia coli cells. As a result of the vast array of such quantitative data, the BioNumbers web site has recently been developed as a repository for biology by the numbers. Second, a complementary and powerful tradition of numerical estimates familiar from the physical sciences and canonized in the so-called "Fermi problems" calls for efforts to estimate key biological quantities on the basis of a few foundational facts and simple ideas from physics and chemistry. In this article, we describe these two approaches and illustrate their synergism in several particularly appealing case studies. These case studies reveal the impact that an emphasis on numbers can have on important biological questions.