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figure that are induced to increase (red/yellow) or decrease (blue) under different
experimental conditions (listed in the top row), whereas the latter shows the wave
numbers (i.e., the number of waves per cm) of light
absorbed
when the electron in
the hydrogen atom undergoes transitions from one energy level to another upon
illumination (Moore 1963; Corney 1977). Figure
10.5a
is about the cell and
Fig.
10.5b
is about the atom, but they both reflect the probabilities of some events
occurring along appropriate structural coordinates in each system. The two columns
of colored horizontal bars in (A) represent the RNA level profiles of two different
mice subject to different experimental perturbations, and the tw rows in (B)
represent the absorption or emission bands of hydrogen atoms in two different stars.
If this qualitative similarity between
the cell
and
the atom
is not limited to the
surface appearance but reflects a deeper connection as suggested in Table
10.4
, cell
biologists might derive some useful lessons from the history of atomic physics.
For example, around 1890, Johannes Lydberg found that the absorption or the
emission lines of the hydrogen atom obeyed a simple formula,
m
2
n
2
u
¼
R(1
1
Þ
(10.1)
=
=
where
is the wave number (or the number of waves per cm) of the light absorbed,
m and n are positive integers where n
u
, for different series
of absorption lines such as the Balmer series, Lyman series, Paschen series, etc.,
and R is the Rydberg constant (109,677 cm
1
) (Atkins 1998). N. Bohr later showed
that m and n are associated with the ground and excited states, respectively, of the
electron in the hydrogen atom (Moore 1963; Corney 1977) (see Fig.
10.6
). This
formula remained a mystery until 1913, when Bohr proposed a theoretical model
of the hydrogen atom based on the combination of the experimental data on atoms
obtained by Rutherford and the theoretical concept of the
quantum of action
discovered by M. Planck in 1900 from his analysis of blackbody radiation data.
The Bohr's atomic model led to the correct interpretations of the meanings of m
and n as indicated above and to the calculation of the Rydberg constant from the
fundamental constants of physics.
The superficial similarities between the microarray data shown in Fig.
10.5a
and
the line spectra shown in Fig.
10.5b
led me to entertain the following analogy:
The cDNA array technology may be to cell biology of the twenty-first century what the line
spectroscopy was to the atomic physics of the twentieth century.
¼
m+1,m+2,
...
(10.2)
This and other related analogies and comparisons are summarized in Table
10.4
.
This table is not meant to be exhaustively complete but lists only those items related
to the theoretical cell biological research that I have been engaged in during the past
four decades and, thus, may omit many related contributions made by other
researchers, for example, the work of Craig Benham on SIDSs (stress-induced
duplex destabilizations) which is directly related to the concept of conformons
(Benham 1996a, b).
The term “ribonoscopy” appearing in Row 2 is defined as the experimental
technique for studying genome-wide (i.e., over the whole set of genes in a cell)
changes in the levels of the RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecules inside the cell
