Kwon Yung-Keun, Cho Kwang-Hyun
School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Ulsan, San 29, Mugeo 2-dong, Nam-gu, Ulsan, Republic of Korea.
Bioinformatics. 2008 Sep 1;24(17):1926-32. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btn337. Epub 2008 Jul 2.
It is widely accepted that cell signaling networks have been evolved to be robust against perturbations. To investigate the topological characteristics resulting in such robustness, we have examined large-scale signaling networks and found that a number of feedback loops are present mostly in coupled structures. In particular, the coupling was made in a coherent way implying that same types of feedback loops are interlinked together.
We have investigated the role of such coherently coupled feedback loops through extensive Boolean network simulations and found that a high proportion of coherent couplings can enhance the robustness of a network against its state perturbations. Moreover, we found that the robustness achieved by coherently coupled feedback loops can be kept evolutionarily stable. All these results imply that the coherent coupling of feedback loops might be a design principle of cell signaling networks devised to achieve the robustness.
细胞信号网络已进化到对扰动具有鲁棒性，这一点已被广泛接受。为了研究导致这种鲁棒性的拓扑特征，我们检查了大规模信号网络，发现许多反馈环大多存在于耦合结构中。特别是，耦合是以一种连贯的方式进行的，这意味着相同类型的反馈环相互连接在一起。
我们通过广泛的布尔网络模拟研究了这种连贯耦合反馈环的作用，发现高比例的连贯耦合可以增强网络对其状态扰动的鲁棒性。此外，我们发现由连贯耦合反馈环实现的鲁棒性可以在进化上保持稳定。所有这些结果表明，反馈环的连贯耦合可能是细胞信号网络为实现鲁棒性而设计的一种设计原则。
