The cellular dogma
Stephen R. Quake 1,2 steve@czbiohub.org
1 The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Redwood City, CA, USA
2 Depts of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Abstract
In this essay, I will put forth what I see as a major conceptual challenge for biology in the next decade, one that is inspired by Crick’s Central Dogma: understanding information flow in the cell in the most general sense.
Main text
So genocentric has modern biology become that we have forgotten that the real units of function and structure in an organism are cells and not genes.—Sydney Brenner (2002)
Francis Crick devised the “Central Dogma” in trying to understand a particular problem: protein synthesis, and specifically the flow of information in protein synthesis.1 This great advance took place during the early days of the molecular biology revolution, when biologists were trying to understand the individual molecules of the cell and the principles by which they are created. Today, that program of discovering individual molecules is in many senses complete: the entire genomes of all major model organisms have been sequenced, more than 250 million genes from a much larger set of organisms have been discovered and sequenced, structures of 200,000 proteins derived from those genes have been experimentally determined, and reasonably good computational predictions exist for the structures of all remaining proteins.
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