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This study investigates the structural architecture of biological dissipative networks, finding that energy-producing modules tend to become isolated from functional modules during evolution. Through evolutionary simulations applied to classic biological networks including kinetic proofreading, activator-inhibitor oscillators, and adaptive response models, the authors demonstrate that this decoupling of high-energy fuel molecules emerges as an evolutionary outcome even when selection pressure targets only network function. The decoupled fuel modules were found to increase both overall energy dissipation and network robustness against parameter and structural perturbations, with theoretical analysis supporting these findings.
Why it matters
Understanding how biological networks evolve their energy-handling architecture could inform the design of synthetic biological circuits and artificial dissipative systems with improved stability and efficiency. These principles may also provide a framework for interpreting the organization of metabolic and signaling networks in living cells.
arXiv:2410.09447v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recently, plenty research has been done on discovering the role of energy dissipation in biological networks, most of which focus on the relationship of dissipation and functionality. However, the development of networks science urged us to fathom the systematic architecture of biological networks and their evolutionary advantages. We found the dissipation of biological dissipative networks is highly related to their structure. By interrogating these well-adapted networks, we find that the energy producing module is relatively isolated in all situations. We applied evolutionary simulation and analysis on premature networks of classic dissipative networks, namely kinetic proofreading, activator-inhibitor oscillator and two typical adaptative response models. We found despite that selection was imposed merely on the network function, the networks tended to decouple high energy molecules as fuels from the functional module, to achieve higher overall dissipation during the course of evolution. Furthermore, we find that decoupled fuel modules can increase the robustness of the networks towards parameter or structure perturbations. We provide theoretical analysis on the kinetic proofreading networks and the general case of energy-driven networks. We find fuel decoupling can guarantee higher dissipation and, in most cases when considering dissipative networks, higher performance. We conclude that fuel decoupling is an evolutionary outcome and bears benefits during evolution.
Source: Evolutionary origin of the bipartite architecture of dissipative cellular networks