Evolutionary origin of the bipartite architecture of dissipative cellular networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how biological dissipative networks evolve to decouple energy-producing modules, leading to higher dissipation, robustness, and performance, supported by simulations and theoretical analysis.

Contribution

It reveals that fuel decoupling is an evolutionary strategy in dissipative networks, enhancing their dissipation and robustness.

Findings

Energy dissipation is linked to network structure.

Networks tend to decouple fuel modules during evolution.

Decoupled fuel modules increase robustness and dissipation.

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.