If you've read enough of the reporting on the completion of genomes, you'll invariably come across a science writer who has compared the genome to the operating system of the cell. Apparently, a team of researchers from Yale decided to take the metaphor seriously. They built a call graph of the Linux kernel, and compared that to the gene regulation network of the gut bacterium E. coli. Given that the two serve radically different purposes, it should come as no surprise that the layouts look radically different—but the real surprise may be that there are so many intriguing points of comparison.
