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Evolvability and hierarchy in rewired bacterial gene networks.
Nature. 2008 Apr 17; 452(7189): 840-5.
Abstract
Sequencing DNA from several organisms has revealed that duplication and drift of existing genes have primarily moulded the contents of a given genome. Though the effect of knocking out or overexpressing a particular gene has been studied in many organisms, no study has systematically explored the effect of adding new links in a biological network. To explore network evolvability, we constructed 598 recombinations of promoters (including regulatory regions) with different transcription or sigma-factor genes in Escherichia coli, added over a wild-type genetic background. Here we show that approximately 95% of new networks are tolerated by the bacteria, that very few alter growth, and that expression level correlates with factor position in the wild-type network hierarchy. Most importantly, we find that certain networks consistently survive over the wild type under various selection pressures. Therefore new links in the network are rarely a barrier for evolution and can even confer a fitness advantage.
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Friday, November 27, 2009 - 10:00am at Steele LibraryWhat about this paper? If you have better ideas, let me know.
Login or register to post commentsWe did that one last year - it made it into the top of '07-'08. I'd suggest the new paper from Wingreen and Bassler (et al.). - Joshua K. Michener (Caltech) November 20, 2009 Comment deletedOh I must have missed that meeting! Thanks for pointing that out... - Elisa Franco (Caltech) November 28, 2009 Comment deleted
Login or register to post commentsResearch highlight by Kazuharu Arakawa and Masaru Tomita, Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University, JapanGene duplications and mutations are central driving forces in the evolution of genomes. Genomes must be robust to such changes in order to be
http://blog-msb.embo.org/blog/2008/04/evolvability_and_hierarchy_in.html
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This weeks paper, Evolvability and hierarchy in rewired bacterial gene networks, was suggested by Joel Lopez.Randomly changing parts in a machine often breaks it. Intelligent design nuts claim this is also true of living things and that this is somehow evidence
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/denis036/thisweekinevolution/2008/04/gene_networ...
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In my new Dissection column over at Wired, I take a look at a remarkable new experiment on E. coli. Scientists randomly rewired the network of genes that control much of the microbe's activity and found that it generally just kept humming along.One thing worth
http://www.scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/04/19/is_there_nothing_e_coli_cann...
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Noticed while leafing through today's Nature that Pedro has a paper out (Isalan et al., Evolvability and hierarchy in rewired bacterial gene networks).There's more on this over at Public Rambling.
http://www.ghastlyfop.com/blog/2008/04/nice-work-pedro.html
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On a more scientific and interesting note, a new paper in Nature reports on what happens to E.coli if you mess with its regulatory network in a big way. Not only is the paper interesting, but fellow blogger Pedro Beltrao is one of the authors.The paper takes
http://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2008/04/scrambling-ecoli.html
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Most of my work in the last few years was computational, either looking at the evolution of protein-protein interactions or at the prediction of domain-peptide interactions. The nice thing of working on a lab were a lot of people were doing wet lab experiments
http://pbeltrao.blogspot.com/2008/04/shuffle-project.html