Evolution and statistics of biological regulatory networks

In this thesis, I study the process of evolution of the gene regulatory network in Escherichia coli. First, I characterize the portion of the network that has been documented, and then I simulate growth of the network. In this study, I assume that the network evolves by gene duplication and divergence. Initially, the duplicated gene will retain its old interactions. As the gene accumulates mutations, it gains new interactions and may or may not lose the old interactions. I investigate evidence for the duplication-divergence model by looking at the homology and regulatory networks in E. coli and propose a simple duplication-divergence model for growth. The results show that this simple model cannot fully account for the complexity in the real network fragment as measured by conventional metrics.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Physics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Chandalia, Juhi Kiran, 1979-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Leonid Mirny.

• Physics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32313

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/32313