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Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on July 2, 2008
Bioinformatics 2008 24(17):1926-1932; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn337
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Coherent coupling of feedback loops: a design principle of cell signaling networks

Yung-Keun Kwon 1 and Kwang-Hyun Cho 2,*

1School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Ulsan, San 29, Mugeo 2-dong, Nam-gu, Ulsan 680-749 and 2Department of Bio and Brain Engineering and KI for the BioCentury, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 335 Gwahangno, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.


  Abstract

Motivation: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.

Results: 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.

Contact: ckh{at}kaist.ac.kr

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Associate Editor: Olga Troyanskaya

Received on February 15, 2008; revised on May 22, 2008; accepted on July 1, 2008

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