Workshop on Systems Biology, Thu, 08 Nov, 2007
Speaker: Julie Mitchell
Abstract
A major goal of systems biology is to discover general principles governing the structure and function of biological networks. There has been extensive work characterizing biological networks in terms of global concepts such as small-world networks and scale-free networks. Recently, an effort has been made to characterize local patterns in biological networks using network motifs, which are small patterns found significantly more often in a biological network than in a randomized network. Though network motifs were first defined in gene regulatory networks, they were also found in metabolic networks, although different motifs were found to be significant in this case. Network motifs have been shown to have specific information-processing functions, so that they can be considered functional building blocks of biological networks.
It is natural to ask how the building blocks are put together and what effect this has on their information-processing functions. There are many ways to answer this question, such as motif generalizations and motif clusters. We examined whether motifs combine into self-similar patterns, what we call "recursive motifs." We established the existence of self-similar recursive motifs within metabolic networks and demonstrated how this self-similarity is evident in the time-dependent dynamics. In particular, we showed that the recursive motifs behave similiarly over longer time scales to the small motifs over shorter time scales, and thus, that there is self-similarity in the dynamics corresponding to the self-similarity in the structure. The capacity for multi-stable behavior in such networks is an issue we are presently studying.
URL: www.ricam.oeaw.ac.at/specsem/ssqbm/participants/abstracts/index.php
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