Discovery and Annotation of Genetic Modules

Abstract

Biological complexity, and the complexity of a cell in particular, scales only weakly with the number of components. Instead, a cell’s ability to process information, to respond and adapt to an environment in fugue, is directly related to the combinatorially large number of ways genes can be selected and modulated to express its phenotypic repertoire. Viewed in this way it is clear that a cell lacks a fixed network structure, but instead has the potential to form, subject to physical chemical and structurally determined constraints, an extremely large number of environmentally selected networks of genes and proteins with shared components.