The dark side

By G. Petsko. Genome Biology, 2000

724 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Francis Crick once said that if you cant study function you had better study structure. He probably meant that studying function was hard but structure provided a powerful entry into the problem. But I like to think that he actually was giving us his version of Once you start down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny, advice given about the danger of the Dark Side of the Force, in the movie Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. For if there is a dark side to the structure/function relationship, it is to be found when we search for function. We will all face the dark side before long, as the emphasis in genomics shifts from identifying and sequencing genes to the problem of determining what their products do. Leaving aside the formidable technical challenges posed by that problem, there remains the prospect that the job, as commonly considered, is impossible: because the term function means very different things to different people, and a given gene product might have almost as many functions as there are scientists studying it. There is its biochemical function: the chemical or physical process it carries out when isolated from the cell and studied in vitro. There is its cellular function signal transduction protein, translation inhibitor, transcription factor, and so on-which may depend on its location in the cell, what other molecules it is bound to, when in the cell cycle it is expressed, and so on. Then there is its larger biological function, which is most often defined by the phenotype that is observed when it is deleted or mutated: growth control, or immune regulation, or involvement in morpho-genesis, to name but a few possibilities. The layers are almost infinite, especially for genes in metazoan organisms. Consider actin. Its biochemical function is to bind ATP and hydrolyse it, but it is not very good at that on its own. The ATPase activity can be modulated by the binding of other molecules-a common phenomenon in biochemistry. One could also say that the real function of actin is to self-polymerize, forming filaments. This brings us closer to the cellular roles of actin, but these are legion: essential component of the cytoskeleton, railroad track along which vesicles and other cellular constituents run, anchor for myosin in muscle contraction, target for the mushroom toxin phal-loidin, rigidifier of microvilli, backbone of the acrosome, inhibitor of DNase I, and many …

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on Trust Modeling (2015, background): “Untrust can be represented as (5) Cofta [2007] calls this concept of untrust “mixed trust.””
Investigation of nomophobia and smartphone addiction predictors among adolescents in Turkey: Demographic variables and academic performance (2019, result): “Thus, in accordance with previous findings (Beranuyet al., 2009; Lee et al., 2014b; Lepp, Li, Barkley, & Salehi-Esfahani, 2015), the likelihood of having symptoms associated with smartphone addiction is higher in adolescents with high levels of nomophobic behavior.”
Does Entrepreneurial Leadership Foster Creativity Among Employees and Teams? The Mediating Role of Creative Efficacy Beliefs (2019, background): “Furthermore, our study does not consider the effects of the working environment, which has been suggested as an important boundary condition influencing the effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership in organizational research (e.g. Ensley et al. 2006; Haynes et al. 2015).”
Psychological and behavioral outcomes of social media-induced fear of missing out at the workplace (2021, unknown): “Contrastingly, voyeurism may encourage a more passive use, such as online information-seeking and passive social media surveillance (Dhir et al., 2021; Kaur et al., 2020; Roberts & David, 2020).”
Fear of missing out: Relationships with depression, mindfulness, and physical symptoms. (2016, background): “This sense of uneasiness, popularly referred to as “FoMO,” or the fear of missing out, may drive the use of social media in an attempt to avoid negative mood states and feeling out of the loop (Fox & Moreland, 2015).”
Virtual teams: a review of current literature and directions for future research (2004, background): “Iacono, C.S. and Weisband, S.P. (1997).”
Maladaptive Personality at Work: Exploring the Darkness (2014, background): “This work has established that some maladaptive constructs have negative implications for managerial derailment (Hogan, Raskin, & Fazzini, 1990), leadership (Hogan & Hogan, 2001), and productivity (Moscoso & Salgado, 2004).”