Related papers: Sloppiness, robustness, and evolvability in system…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Natural systems are remarkably robust and resilient, maintaining essential functions despite variability, uncertainty, and hostile conditions. Understanding these nonlinear, dynamic behaviours is challenging because such systems involve…
Biological networks have evolved to be highly functional within uncertain environments while remaining extremely adaptable. One of the main contributors to the robustness and evolvability of biological networks is believed to be their…
Understanding how systems can be designed to be evolvable is fundamental to research in optimization, evolution, and complex systems science. Many researchers have thus recognized the importance of evolvability, i.e. the ability to find new…
Robustness and evolvability are essential properties to the evolution of biological networks. To determine if a biological network is robust and/or evolvable, it is required to compare its functions before and after mutations. However, this…
Control of the living cell functions with remarkable reliability despite the stochastic nature of the underlying molecular networks -- a property presumably optimized by biological evolution. We here ask to what extent the property of a…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite of being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from the complexity of genetic architectures and how it…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
The relationship between network topology and system dynamics has significant implications for unifying our understanding of the interplay among metabolic, gene-regulatory, and ecosystem network architecures. Here we analyze the stability…
Robustness of biochemical systems has become one of the central questions in systems biology although it is notoriously difficult to formally capture its multifaceted nature. Maintenance of normal system function depends not only on the…
Evolving biomolecular networks have to combine the stability against perturbations with flexibility allowing their constituents to assume new roles in the cell. Gene duplication followed by functional divergence of associated proteins is a…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Diverse biological networks exhibit universal features distinguished from those of random networks, calling much attention to their origins and implications. Here we propose a minimal evolution model of Boolean regulatory networks, which…
The concept of robustness of regulatory networks has been closely related to the nature of the interactions among genes, and the capability of pattern maintenance or reproducibility. Defining this robustness property is a challenging task,…
Just as a herd of animals relies on its robust social structure to survive in the wild, similarly robustness is a crucial characteristic for the survival of a complex network under attack. The capacity to measure robustness in complex…
Complex networks have recently attracted much interest due to their prevalence in nature and our daily lives [1, 2]. A critical property of a network is its resilience to random breakdown and failure [3-6], typically studied as a…
Networks are useful descriptions of the structure of many complex systems. Unsurprisingly, it is thus important to analyze the robustness of networks in many scientific disciplines. In applications in communication, logistics, finance,…