From Properties of Cellular Networks to Protein Function

Dennis Vitkup

Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Columbia University

Toward the goal of understanding system properties of biological networks we investigate the global and local regulation and co-evolution in the yeast metabolic network. Our results demonstrate that important evolutionary processes, such as the fixation of mutations, gene duplications, and gene deletions, are influenced by the structure and function of the network. Different evolutionary genomic correlations show a notable agreement in the context of the network. This demonstrates that design principles of metabolic networks are conserved in evolution and are reflected in the structure of bacterial chromosomes. We demonstrate how evolutionary and structural properties of metabolic networks can be used to annotate orphan metabolic activities.