Eleonora De Lazzari* published her findings on scaling laws for gene families. A striking quantitative invariant in evolutionary genomics is the scaling with genome size of the number of proteins sharing a specific function. E.D.L. showed that such scaling laws exist systematically at the level of single evolutionary families. This provides a novel view of the links between evolutionary expansion of protein families and gene functions.This work was performed in collaboration with J Grilli (U. Chicago) and S Maslov (U. Illinois).

Gherardi M, Mandrà S, Bassetti B, Cosentino Lagomarsino M, "Evidence for soft bounds in Ubuntu package sizes and mammalian body masses"Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2013 Dec 24;110(52):21054-8.UPMC web site (in French)PNAS web site