Related papers: Essentiality landscape of metabolic networks
The metabolic network of a living cell involves several hundreds or thousands of interconnected biochemical reactions. Previous research has shown that under realistic conditions only a fraction of these reactions is concurrently active in…
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…
Metabolic reactions of single-cell organisms are routinely observed to become dispensable or even incapable of carrying activity under certain circumstances. Yet, the mechanisms as well as the range of conditions and phenotypes associated…
Recent genomic analyses on the cellular metabolic network show that reaction flux across enzymes are diverse and exhibit power-law behavior in its distribution. While one may guess that the reactions with larger fluxes are more likely to be…
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…
Accurately determining and classifying the structure of complex networks is the focus of much current research. One class of network of particular interest are metabolic pathways, which have previously been studied from a graph theoretical…
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…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
We unravel how functional plasticity and redundancy are essential mechanisms underlying the ability to survive of metabolic networks. We perform an exhaustive computational screening of synthetic lethal reaction pairs in Escherichia coli in…
The metabolism is the motor behind the biological complexity of an organism. One problem of characterizing its large-scale structure is that it is hard to know what to compare it to. All chemical reaction systems are shaped by the same…
Complex biological systems are very robust to genetic and environmental changes at all levels of organization. Many biological functions of Escherichia coli metabolism can be sustained against single-gene or even multiple-gene mutations by…
Microbial communities display extreme diversity. A variety of strains or species coexist even when limited by a single resource. It has been argued that metabolite secretion creates new niches and facilitates such diversity. Nonetheless, it…
A fundamental question for evolutionary biology is why rates of evolution vary dramatically between proteins. Perhaps surprisingly, it is controversial how much a protein's functional importance affects its rate of evolution. In most…
How self-organized networks develop, mature and degenerate is a key question for sociotechnical, cyberphysical and biological systems with potential applications from tackling violent extremism through to neurological diseases. So far, it…
Functional responses are widely used to describe interactions and resources exchange between individuals in ecology. The form given to functional responses dramatically affects the dynamics and stability of populations and communities.…
The composition of cellular metabolism is different across species. Empirical data reveal that bacterial species contain similar numbers of metabolic reactions but that the cross-species popularity of reactions is so heterogenous that some…
[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…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…