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Network, degeneracy and bow tie. Integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system

Recently, the network paradigm, an application of graph theory to biology, has proven to be a powerful approach to gaining insights into biological complexity, and has catalyzed the advancement of systems biology. In this perspective and focusing on the immune system, we propose here a more comprehe...

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Autores principales: Tieri, Paolo, Grignolio, Andrea, Zaikin, Alexey, Mishto, Michele, Remondini, Daniel, Castellani, Gastone C, Franceschi, Claudio
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2010
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2927512/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20701759
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-4682-7-32
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author Tieri, Paolo
Grignolio, Andrea
Zaikin, Alexey
Mishto, Michele
Remondini, Daniel
Castellani, Gastone C
Franceschi, Claudio
author_facet Tieri, Paolo
Grignolio, Andrea
Zaikin, Alexey
Mishto, Michele
Remondini, Daniel
Castellani, Gastone C
Franceschi, Claudio
author_sort Tieri, Paolo
collection PubMed
description Recently, the network paradigm, an application of graph theory to biology, has proven to be a powerful approach to gaining insights into biological complexity, and has catalyzed the advancement of systems biology. In this perspective and focusing on the immune system, we propose here a more comprehensive view to go beyond the concept of network. We start from the concept of degeneracy, one of the most prominent characteristic of biological complexity, defined as the ability of structurally different elements to perform the same function, and we show that degeneracy is highly intertwined with another recently-proposed organizational principle, i.e. 'bow tie architecture'. The simultaneous consideration of concepts such as degeneracy, bow tie architecture and network results in a powerful new interpretative tool that takes into account the constructive role of noise (stochastic fluctuations) and is able to grasp the major characteristics of biological complexity, i.e. the capacity to turn an apparently chaotic and highly dynamic set of signals into functional information.
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spelling pubmed-29275122010-08-25 Network, degeneracy and bow tie. Integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system Tieri, Paolo Grignolio, Andrea Zaikin, Alexey Mishto, Michele Remondini, Daniel Castellani, Gastone C Franceschi, Claudio Theor Biol Med Model Research Recently, the network paradigm, an application of graph theory to biology, has proven to be a powerful approach to gaining insights into biological complexity, and has catalyzed the advancement of systems biology. In this perspective and focusing on the immune system, we propose here a more comprehensive view to go beyond the concept of network. We start from the concept of degeneracy, one of the most prominent characteristic of biological complexity, defined as the ability of structurally different elements to perform the same function, and we show that degeneracy is highly intertwined with another recently-proposed organizational principle, i.e. 'bow tie architecture'. The simultaneous consideration of concepts such as degeneracy, bow tie architecture and network results in a powerful new interpretative tool that takes into account the constructive role of noise (stochastic fluctuations) and is able to grasp the major characteristics of biological complexity, i.e. the capacity to turn an apparently chaotic and highly dynamic set of signals into functional information. BioMed Central 2010-08-11 /pmc/articles/PMC2927512/ /pubmed/20701759 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-4682-7-32 Text en Copyright ©2010 Tieri et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research
Tieri, Paolo
Grignolio, Andrea
Zaikin, Alexey
Mishto, Michele
Remondini, Daniel
Castellani, Gastone C
Franceschi, Claudio
Network, degeneracy and bow tie. Integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system
title Network, degeneracy and bow tie. Integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system
title_full Network, degeneracy and bow tie. Integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system
title_fullStr Network, degeneracy and bow tie. Integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system
title_full_unstemmed Network, degeneracy and bow tie. Integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system
title_short Network, degeneracy and bow tie. Integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system
title_sort network, degeneracy and bow tie. integrating paradigms and architectures to grasp the complexity of the immune system
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2927512/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20701759
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-4682-7-32
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