COMPACTNESS AND CYCLES IN SIGNAL TRANSDUCTION AND TRANSCRIPTIONAL REGULATION NETWORKS: A SIGNATURE OF NATURAL SELECTION?

Andreas Wagner () and Jeremiah Wright
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Andreas Wagner: Department of Biology, MSC03 2020, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-0001, USA
Jeremiah Wright: Department of Biology, MSC03 2020, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-0001, USA

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2004, vol. 07, issue 03n04, 419-432

Abstract: We ask whether natural selection has shaped three biologically important features of 15 signal transduction networks and two genome-scale transcriptional regulation networks. These features are regulatory cycles, the lengths of the longest pathways through a network — a measure of network compactness — and the abundance of node pairs connected by many alternative regulatory pathways. We determine whether these features are significantly more or less abundant in biological networks than in randomized networks with the same distribution of incoming and outgoing connections per network node. We find that autoregulatory cycles are of exceptionally high abundance in transcriptional regulation networks. All other cycles, however, are significantly less abundant in several signal transduction networks. This suggests that the multistability caused by complex feedback loops in a network may interfere with the functioning of such networks. We also find that several of the networks we examine are more compact than expected by chance alone. This raises the possibility that the transmission of information through such networks, which is fastest in compact networks, is a biologically important characteristic of such networks.

Keywords: Network biology; network evolution; molecular evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525904000251

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