NETWORKS AND CIRCUITS IN CELL REGULATION

The complete understanding of the complex regulation network of eukaryotic cells is currently out of reach. The large amount of data emerging from high-throughput techniques requires the development of a new awareness of the conceptual and computational tools needed by cell biologists. Large-scale “omics ” data are often represented as networks of interacting components but such representation is inherently static and, as such, cannot provide a realistic picture of the temporal dynamics of complex cellular functions. These difficulties suggest to move to a modelling strategy that explicitly takes into account both the wiring of the components and the task they perform. From an engineering perspective, this problem resembles that of “circuit analysis”. In this work we will concentrate on a particular but important biological circuit, the G1/S transition event in the yeast cell cycle and report, for the first time, a comparison between the network representation of a biological module and the corresponding circuit which accounts for its dynamical properties.