Exploiting bacterial growth laws to characterize indirect mechanisms for generating phenotypic heterogeneity from isogenic populations

从雅各布和莫诺时代起，贯穿微生物学和细菌生理学的一个主导主题是，DNA中编码的信息可以通过简单元素的多尺度组合与生物体的生理状态联系起来：操纵子内的基因、网络内的操纵子和细胞内的网络。这种自下而上理解(以及最近的合成)遗传网络的方法类似于电路设计的工程原理-一个富有成效的类比导致了重大的概念进步，特别是在新兴的系统生物学领域。但这种类比的局限性当然是，电路不会生长和分裂。

From the time of Jacob and Monod, a dominant theme running through microbiology and bacterial physiology is the idea that the information encoded in DNA can be connected to the physiological state of the organism through a multi-scale assembly of simple elements: the gene within an operon, the operon within a network and the network within the cell. This bottom-up approach to the understanding (and, more recently, the synthesis) of genetic networks is analogous to the engineering principles of electrical circuit design - a fruitful analogy that has lead to significant conceptual advances particularly in the burgeoning field of systems biology. But the limitation of this analogy is, of course, that electrical circuits do not grow and divide.