Related papers: Detecting the Escherichia coli metabolic backbone
Recon 2 is a highly curated reconstruction of the human metabolic network. Whilst the network is state of the art, it has shortcomings, including the presence of unbalanced reactions involving generic metabolites. By replacing these generic…
The chemotaxis pathway in the bacterium Escherichia coli allows cells to detect changes in external ligand concentration (e.g. nutrients). The pathway regulates the flagellated rotary motors and hence the cells' swimming behaviour, steering…
Bacterial growth depends crucially on metabolic fluxes, which are limited by the cell's capacity to maintain metabolic enzymes. The necessary enzyme amount per unit flux is a major determinant of metabolic strategies both in evolution and…
Molecular transport of biomolecules plays a pivotal role in the machinery of life. Yet, this role is poorly understood due the lack of quantitative information. Here, the role and properties of the C-terminal region of Escherichia coli Hfq…
Motile bacteria can migrate along chemical gradients in a process known as chemotaxis. When exposed to uniform environmental stress, Escherichia coli cells coordinate their chemotactic responses to form millimeter-sized condensates…
Dynamical properties of the transcriptional regulatory network of {\it Escherichia coli} and {\it Saccharomyces cerevisiae} are studied within the framework of random Boolean functions. The dynamical response of these networks to a single…
In living cells, biochemical reactions are catalyzed by specific enzymes and connect to one another by sharing substrates and products, forming complex networks. In our previous studies, we established a framework determining the responses…
Proteins are large biomolecules that regulate all living organisms and consist of one or several chains. The primary structure of a protein chain is a sequence of amino acid residues whose three main atoms (alpha-carbon, nitrogen, and…
The tryptophan (trp) operon in E. coli codes for the proteins responsible for the synthesis of the amino acid tryptophan from chorismic acid, and has been one of the most well-studied gene networks since its discovery in the 1960s. The…
Microbial communities assemble through a complex set of interactions between microbes and their environment, and the resulting metabolic impact on the host ecosystem can be profound. Microbial activity is known to impact human health, plant…
The molecular machinery of life is largely created via self-organisation of individual molecules into functional assemblies. Minimal coarse-grained models, where a whole macromolecule is represented by a small number of particles, can be of…
Background: Previous studies have used different methods in an effort to extract the modular organization of transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs). However, these approaches are not natural, as they try to cluster highly connected…
We introduce a new computational problem, the BackboneDiscovery problem, which encapsulates both functional and structural aspects of network analysis. While the topology of a typical road network has been available for a long time (e.g.,…
One of the major research questions regarding human microbiome studies is the feasibility of designing interventions that modulate the composition of the microbiome to promote health and cure disease. This requires extensive understanding…
It is well known that tumors originating from the same tissue have different prognosis and sensitivity to treatments. Over the last decade, cancer genomics consortia like the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) have been generating thousands of…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of network backbone discovery. In complex systems, a "backbone" takes a central role in carrying out the system functionality and carries the bulk of system traffic. It also both simplifies and…
Bacteria seem masters of chemotaxis, yet recent work suggests otherwise. Henry Mattingly and colleagues (Nature Physics, 2026) argue that Escherichia coli uses only a small fraction of the sensory information available at its surface,…
One of the major characteristics of living organisms is metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy produced per unit of time. When the mass of organisms increases, the metabolic rate also increases (usually as a power function of mass),…
A general theoretical framework is put forth to organize and understand various observed phenomena and mathematical relationships in the field of molecular biology. By modeling each cell in eukaryotic organisms as a processor having a…
We present a dynamical model of lipoprotein metabolism derived by combining a cascading process in the blood stream and cellular level regulatory dynamics. We analyse the existence and stability of equilibria and show that this…