Main page
Author's kit
Registration
Program
Organization
Venue
More information
wcsb06@cs.tut.fi
Hosted by
TUT CSB group
Abstract --- Maximino Aldana-Gonzalez, Centro de Ciencias Fisicas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, MexicoRobustness and Evolvability in Genetic Regulatory Networks Living organisms are robust to a myriad of random perturbations, both internal and external. Gene regulation networks and metabolic pathways self-organize and reaccommodate to make the organism perform with stability and reliability under perturbations. At the same time, living organisms are evolvable, which means that internal perturbations can eventually make the organism acquire new functions and adapt to new environments. It is still an open problem to determine how robustness and evolvability blend together to produce stable organisms that yet can change and evolve. Here we address this problem by studying the dynamical stability of genetic regulatory network models under the process of gene duplication and divergence. We show that an intrinsic property of this kind of networks is that, after the divergence of the parent and duplicate genes, with a high probability the previous functions of the network are preserved and new ones might appear. The above is true in a variety of network topologies and even for the case of extreme divergence in which the duplicate gene bears no relation with its parent. Consequently, the robustness observed in the network dynamics is not associated with any kind of gene redundancy. Rather, it seems to be a distributed robustness produced by the collective behavior of the entire network. |