Is prokaryotic complexity limited by accelerated growth inregulatory overhead?
By Larry J Croft, Martin J Lercher, Michael J. Gagen, John S. Mattick. Genome Biology, 2003
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
BackgroundIncreased biological complexity is generally associated with the addition of new genetic information, which must be integrated into the existing regulatory network thatoperates within the cell. General arguments on network control, as well as several recentgenomic observations, indicate that regulatory gene number grows disproportionally fast withincreasing genome size.ResultsWe present two models for the growth of regulatory networks. Both predict that the number of transcriptional regulators will scale quadratically with total gene number. Thisappears to be in good quantitative agreement with genomic data from 89 fully sequencedprokaryotes. Moreover, the empirical curve predicts that any new non-regulatory gene willbe accompanied by more than one additional regulator beyond a genome size of about20,000 genes, within a factor of two of the observed ceiling.ConclusionsOur analysis places transcriptional regulatory networks in the class of accelerating networks. We suggest that prokaryotic complexity may have been limited throughoutevolution by regulatory overhead, and conversely that complex eukaryotes must havebypassed this constraint by novel strategies.
Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b21331f62a4aef92ece2a684a3bf32661aba209
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Genetics
In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- Variation in alternative splicing across human tissues (2004, result): “Repeating the analyses by removing ESTs from disease-associated tissue libraries, using available library classifications [40], gave qualitatively similar results (see Additional data files 2, 3, and 4).”