Biological logics are restricted

Understanding how genes interact and relate to each other is a fundamental question in biology. However, current practices for describing these relationships, such as drawing diagrams or graphs in a somewhat arbitrary manner, limit our ability to integrate various aspects of the gene functions and view the genome holistically. To overcome these limitations, we need a more appropriate way to describe the intricate relationships between genes. Interestingly, category theory, an...

We quantify the influence of the topology of a transcriptional regulatory network on its ability to process environmental signals. By posing the problem in terms of information theory, we may do this without specifying the function performed by the network. Specifically, we study the maximum mutual information between the input (chemical) signal and the output (genetic) response attainable by the network in the context of an analytic model of particle number fluctuations. We ...

Complex systems are often modeled as Boolean networks in attempts to capture their logical structure and reveal its dynamical consequences. Approximating the dynamics of continuous variables by discrete values and Boolean logic gates may, however, introduce dynamical possibilities that are not accessible to the original system. We show that large random networks of variables coupled through continuous transfer functions often fail to exhibit the complex dynamics of correspond...

Cellular phenotypes are determined by the dynamical activity of networks of co-regulated genes. Elucidating such networks is crucial for the understanding of normal cell physiology as well as for the dissection of complex pathologic phenotypes. Existing methods for such "reverse engineering" of genetic networks from microarray expression data have been successful only in prokaryotes (E. coli) and lower eukaryotes (S. cerevisiae) with relatively simple genomes. Additionally, t...

Gene regulatory networks typically have low in-degrees, whereby any given gene is regulated by few of the genes in the network. They also tend to have broad distributions for the out-degree. What mechanisms might be responsible for these degree distributions? Starting with an accepted framework of the binding of transcription factors to DNA, we consider a simple model of gene regulatory dynamics. There, we show that selection for a target expression pattern leads to the emerg...

Gene duplication is a fundamental evolutionary mechanism that contributes to biological complexity and diversity (Fortna et al., 2004). Traditionally, research has focused on the duplication of gene sequences (Zhang, 1914). However, evidence suggests that the duplication of regulatory elements may also play a significant role in the evolution of genomic functions (Teichmann and Babu, 2004; Hallin and Landry, 2019). In this work, the evolution of regulatory relationships belon...

Computational models of biological processes provide one of the most powerful methods for a detailed analysis of the mechanisms that drive the behavior of complex systems. Logic-based modeling has enhanced our understanding and interpretation of those systems. Defining rules that determine how the output activity of biological entities is regulated by their respective inputs has proven to be challenging, due to increasingly larger models and the presence of noise in data, all...

Structural and dynamical fingerprints of evolutionary optimization in biological networks are still unclear. We here analyze the dynamics of genetic regulatory networks responsible for the regulation of cell cycle and cell differentiation in three organisms or cell types each, and show that they obey a version of Hebb's rule which we term as coherence. More precisely, we find that simultaneously expressed genes with a common target are less likely to conflict at the attractor...

Complex, non-additive genetic interactions are common and can be critical in determining phenotypes. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and similar statistical studies of linkage data, however, assume additive models of gene interactions in looking for genotype-phenotype associations. These statistical methods view the compound effects of multiple genes on a phenotype as a sum of partial influences of each individual gene and can often miss a substantial part of the herit...

The cell cycle is a tightly controlled process, yet its underlying genetic network shows marked differences across species. Which of the associated structural features follow solely from the ability to impose the appropriate gene expression patterns? We tackle this question in silico by examining the ensemble of all regulatory networks which satisfy the constraint of producing a given sequence of gene expressions. We focus on three cell cycle profiles coming from baker's yeas...