New Evidence On The Robustness Of Metabolic Networks
Monday, September 8, 2008 - 00:28
in Biology & Nature
Biological systems evolve in ways that increase their fitness for survival amidst environmental fluctuations and internal errors. Now researchers have found new evidence that evolution has produced cell metabolisms that are especially well suited to handle potentially harmful changes like gene deletions and mutations. The team developed a mathematical model, which could be useful in bioengineering, medicine and the design of synthetic networks, describing the cascading failure phenomenon as a percolation-like process.