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Apropos the 2010 PNAS article "Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks"

Abstract: "The genome has often been called the operating system (OS) for a living organism. A computer OS is described by a regulatory control network termed the call graph, which is analogous to the transcriptional regulatory network in a cell. To apply our firsthand knowledge of the architecture of software systems to understand cellular design principles, we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (Escherichia coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. We show that both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions."

dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914771107 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1e5a/bf57c88ad060046c5b2adc...