Quantifying the notion of a canalizing gene in a gene regulatory network

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Abstract

Genomic regulatory networks are examples of complex systems with distributed control and abundant feedback. The concept of genes that can constrain, or canalize, such a complex network to a specic behavior was first proposed by C. Waddington in 1942 [1]. Waddington stipulated the existence of genes that can produce reliable developmental effects against genetic mutations or environmental changes during evolution [2], [1]. Zhao et al. [3] made a clear distinction between master genes and canalizing genes. Both master and canalizing genes exert a strong control over many downstream gene pathways; however, canalizing genes have an additional ability of taking over the control and overriding other regulatory instructions. Canalizing genes produce adaptive and optimal reactions to environmental, stochastic and genetic perturbations and they are essential in a complex system, so it can achieve biological robustness and buffer itself from the eects of random alterations or operating errors.
Our work suggests that the currently adopted denitions of canalizing and master genes should be modified to include a relative characterization of these properties in such a way that a particular gene does not have to be exclusively a master or a canalizing one.

Author Biography

Ivan Ivanov*, Texas A&M University

Ivan Ivanov received his M.S. (Mathematics) from the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria in 1987 and Ph.D. (Mathematics) from the University of South Florida in 1999. He was a Research Professor at the Mathematics Department of Syracuse University (1999 – 2000) and Texas A&M University (TAMU) (2000 – 2003). Dr. Ivanov was a postdoctoral trainee in the Training Program in Bioinformatics, TAMU (2003 – 2005). He is currently a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology, TAMU.  Dr. Ivanov actively mentors and trains students of all levels. His research focuses in key areas of computational and systems biology and has resulted in over 80 research papers published in peer reviewed journals, and several successful grant applications. He serves as the Director of the Quantitative Biology Core of the Center for Translational and Environmental Health Research (CTEHR). Dr. Ivanov is a member of the Intercollegiate Faculty of Toxicology, the Interdisciplinary Faculty of the Professional Program of Biotechnology and the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, TAMU, and an adjunct professor in both ECE and Statistics departments, TAMU.

References

C. H. Waddington, Canalization of development and the inheritance of ac-

quired characters, Nature 150, 563{565, 1942.

A. Wagner, Robustness and evolvability in living systems, Princeton University Press, 2005.

C. Zhao et. al., Pathway Regulatory Analysis in the Context of Bayesian

Networks Using the Coeffcient of Determination, J. of Biological Systems,

, no.3, 651{682, 2012.

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Published

2018-03-29

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Conference Contributions