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Attractors and Democratic Dynamics, Y. Bar-Yam, D. Harmon, B. de Bivort, Science 323, 5917 (2009).

In this Science Perspective we describe a new cell regulation framework that accounts for a cell's robustness to random perturbations and its sensitivity to specific environmental changes. We incorporate features from architectures analogous to "autocratic" and "democratic" systems to describe an intermediate framework which captures the interplay between influential individual genes and the collective behavior of thousands of genes. With this insight we can understand how more influential genes allow a cell to adapt to specific environmental changes, but the collective influence of many genes gives a cell a protective robustness against random noise.

• Full Article
• Download supplementary materials (PDF)
• Visualization: Discrimination of tissue cell-types: Video (Quicktime)
• Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam discusses cell regulation: Video (Quicktime) or Audio (mp3)
• Press Release
  
• Previous Work: Systems Biology Research
• Previous Work: Technical Report: The Future of Democracy? (PDF).

For a PDF copy of the article, please email news@necsi.edu