"Reverse engeneering"

Ao pesquisar as diferenças entre as leveduras Saccharomyces cerevisiae e Schizosaccharomyces pombe dei com um artigo (Forsburg, 1999 TIG 9:340-344) que começa com a comparação entre a abordagem da engenharia e a da biologia:

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), there is a famous undergraduate engineering course in which the students are given identical boxes of parts and told to design and build a robot to carry out a single assigned task. Naturally, each student uses the same pieces to devise distinctly different robots. There is more than one way to solve the problem, although the solutions differ in their elegance or efficiency. Biological research is the reverse: taking apart the pieces to see how the design really works. Not surprisingly, the pieces are often closely related, even when the final product looks quite different. Just as in the robots, the same task in living cells can be fulfilled by using similar parts in dissimilar ways.

Este é o fundamento para o uso de organismos modelo na investigação de problemas biológicos. Em organismos tão diferentes como o ser humano e as leveduras as parecenças podem ser enormes; é uma questão de "descer" à escala celular e molecular.

(foto: Peter Hollenhorst and Catherine Fox)