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The ubiquity of modules in biological networks may result from an evolutionary benefit of a modular organization. For instance, modularity may increase the rate of adaptive evolution, because modules can be easily combined into new…
To what extent do the characteristic features of a chemical reaction network reflect its purpose and function? In general, one argues that correlations between specific features and specific functions are key to understanding a complex…
Many of the chemical reactions that take place within a living cell are irreversible. Due to evolutionary pressures, the number of allowable reactions within these systems are highly constrained and thus the resulting metabolic networks…
In a cell or microorganism the processes that generate mass, energy, information transfer, and cell fate specification are seamlessly integrated through a complex network of various cellular constituents and reactions. However, despite the…
The large-scale organization of complex networks, both natural and artificial, has shown the existence of highly heterogeneous patterns of organization. Such patterns typically involve scale-free degree distributions and small world,…
Metabolic networks perform some of the most fundamental functions in living cells, including energy transduction and building block biosynthesis. While these are the best characterized networks in living systems, understanding their…
Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…
[Background] Several studies have mentioned network modularity -- that a network can easily be decomposed into subgraphs that are densely connected within and weakly connected between each other -- as a factor affecting metabolic…
Metabolic networks consist of linked functional components, or modules. The mechanism underlying metabolic network modularity is of great interest not only to researchers of basic science but also to those in fields of engineering. Previous…
Chemical reaction networks underpin biological and physical phenomena across scales, from microbial interactions to planetary atmosphere dynamics. Bacterial communities exhibit complex competitive interactions for resources, human organs…
The large-scale properties of chemical reaction systems, such as the metabolism, can be studied with graph-based methods. To do this, one needs to reduce the information -- lists of chemical reactions -- available in databases. Even for the…
The architecture of biological networks has been reported to exhibit high level of modularity, and to some extent, topological modules of networks overlap with known functional modules. However, how the modular topology of the molecular…
Understanding design principles of complex cellular organization is one of the major challenges in biology. Recent analysis of the large-scale cellular organization has revealed the scale-free nature and robustness of metabolic and protein…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
Living organisms produce metabolites of many types via their metabolisms. Especially, flavonoids, a kind of secondary metabolites, of plant species are interesting examples. Since plant species are believed to have specific flavonoids with…
Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…
The molecular network in an organism consists of transcription/translation regulation, protein-protein interactions/modifications and a metabolic network, together forming a system that allows the cell to respond sensibly to the multiple…
Metabolic networks have two properties that are generally regarded as unrelated: One, they have metabolic reactions whose single knockout is lethal for the organism, and two, they have correlated sets of reactions forming functional…
Deciphering the control principles of metabolism and its interaction with other cellular functions is central to biomedicine and biotechnology. Yet, understanding the efficient control of metabolic fluxes remains elusive for large-scale…