Math model predicts cellular actions

University of Texas at Austin Assistant Professor Orly Alter said the achievement brings biologists closer to being able to understand and control the inner workings of the cell.

"Thanks to the Human Genome Project, biology and medicine today may be at a point similar to where physics was after the advent of the telescope," Alter said. "The rapidly growing number of large-scale DNA microarray data sets hold the key to the discovery of cellular mechanisms, just as the astronomical tables compiled by Galileo and Tycho after the invention of the telescope enabled accurate predictions of planetary motions and, later, the discovery of universal gravitation."

In a 2004 study, Alter used mathematical techniques to predict a previously unknown mechanism of regulation that correlates the beginning of DNA replication with RNA transcription -- the first mechanism to be predicted from mathematical modeling of microarray data.

For the past four years, Alter and her students worked with John Diffley of the London Research Institute of Cancer Research on experiments that were designed to test that prediction.

The results of their research appear in the Oct. 13 online edition of the journal Nature Molecular Systems Biology.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International.