Measuring the Evolutionary Rewiring of Biological Networks
PLoS Comput Biol, 7 (1):
e1001050+ (Jan 6, 2011)DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001050
Abstract
We have accumulated a large amount of biological network data and expect even more to come. Soon, we anticipate being able to compare many different biological networks as we commonly do for molecular sequences. It has long been believed that many of these networks change, or ” rewire”, at different rates. It is therefore important to develop a framework to quantify the differences between networks in a unified fashion. We developed such a formalism based on analogy to simple models of sequence evolution, and used it to conduct a systematic study of network rewiring on all the currently available biological networks. We found that, similar to sequences, biological networks show a decreased rate of change at large time divergences, because of saturation in potential substitutions. However, different types of biological networks consistently rewire at different rates. Using comparative genomics and proteomics data, we found a consistent ordering of the rewiring rates: transcription regulatory, phosphorylation regulatory, genetic interaction, miRNA regulatory, protein interaction, and metabolic pathway network, from fast to slow. This ordering was found in all comparisons we did of matched networks between organisms. To gain further intuition on network rewiring, we compared our observed rewirings with those obtained from simulation. We also investigated how readily our formalism could be mapped to other network contexts; in particular, we showed how it could be applied to analyze changes in a range of ” commonplace” networks such as family trees, co-authorships and linux-kernel function dependencies. Biological networks represent various types of molecular organizations in a cell. During evolution, molecules have been shown to change at varying rates. Therefore, it is important to investigate the evolution of biological networks in terms of network rewiring. Understanding how biological networks evolve could eventually help explain the general mechanism of cellular system. In the past decade, a large amount of high-throughput experiments have helped to unravel the different types of networks in a number of species. Recent studies have provided evolutionary rate calculations on individual networks and observed different rewiring rates between them. We have chosen a systematic approach to compare rewiring rate differences among the common types of biological networks utilizing experimental data across species. Our analysis shows that regulatory networks generally evolve faster than non-regulatory collaborative networks. Our analysis also highlights future applications of the approach to address other interesting biological questions.