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Synthetic biology

The yin and yang of nature

Nature volume 457, pages 271–272 (2009)Cite this article

Oscillations in gene expression regulate various cellular processes and so must be robust and tunable. Interactions between both negative and positive feedback loops seem to ensure these features.

Periodic oscillations are the basis of timekeeping. For many millennia, the main timekeeper was the water clock, in which time is recorded by the regular dripping of water into or out of a basin. In the seventeenth century, the water clock was replaced by the pendulum clock, following Galileo's famous discovery that the period of a pendulum's swing is independent of the size of the swing. This clock offered a substantial improvement because pendulum oscillations are robust and the period can be altered by changing the length of the pendulum arm. As three papers1,2,3 now indicate, similar improvements are occurring in our ability to generate increasingly robust and tunable oscillations in biological systems. On page 309 of this issue, Tigges et al.1 demonstrate this feat in mammalian cells, and not long ago Stricker et al.2 reported it in bacteria. These two advances are nicely complemented by Tsai and colleagues' recent detailed theoretical study3, which elucidates the essential 'design principles' underlying oscillatory networks in nature.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jeff Gore and Alexander van Oudenaarden are in the Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. avano@mit.edu,

    Jeff Gore & Alexander van Oudenaarden

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  1. Jeff Gore
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  2. Alexander van Oudenaarden
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Gore, J., van Oudenaarden, A. The yin and yang of nature. Nature 457, 271–272 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/457271a

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