Furusawa Chikara, Kaneko Kunihiko
Center for Developmental Biology, The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Kobe 650-0047, Japan.
Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Feb 28;90(8):088102. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.088102. Epub 2003 Feb 26.
Using data from gene expression databases on various organisms and tissues, including yeast, nematodes, human normal and cancer tissues, and embryonic stem cells, we found that the abundances of expressed genes exhibit a power-law distribution with an exponent close to -1; i.e., they obey Zipf's law. Furthermore, by simulations of a simple model with an intracellular reaction network, we found that Zipf's law of chemical abundance is a universal feature of cells where such a network optimizes the efficiency and faithfulness of self-reproduction. These findings provide novel insights into the nature of the organization of reaction dynamics in living cells.
利用来自各种生物体和组织的基因表达数据库的数据，包括酵母、线虫、人类正常组织和癌组织以及胚胎干细胞，我们发现表达基因的丰度呈现幂律分布，指数接近-1；也就是说，它们遵循齐普夫定律。此外，通过对具有细胞内反应网络的简单模型进行模拟，我们发现化学丰度的齐普夫定律是细胞的一个普遍特征，在这样的网络中，自我繁殖的效率和忠实性得到优化。这些发现为活细胞中反应动力学组织的本质提供了新的见解。
