Complex Systems Approach to Genomes and Ecosystems
Many complex systems are modular. Such systems can be represented as “component systems,” i.e., sets of elementary components - for instance genomes as collection of genes belonging to different categories or ecosystems as sets of organisms belonging to different species. The underlying functional design and constraints of such component systems are not obvious a priori, and their detection is often a challenge of both scientific and practical importance, requiring a clear understanding of component statistics. We study the architectural features of genomes and ecosystems from the point of view of component statistics with two main questions in mind: (i) what does component statistic reveal about the underlying generative processes of the systems (ii) how can we distinguish statistical null features from functionally relevant ones.
Working on this topic: Simone Pompei, Mattia Corigliano
Key publications:
A Mazzolini, M Gherardi, M Caselle, M Cosentino Lagomarsino, M Osella, Statistics of shared components in complex component systems Physical Review X 8 (2), 021023, 2018
E de Lazzari, J Grilli, S Maslov, M Cosentino Lagomarsino, Family-specific scaling laws in bacterial genomes Nucleic Acids Research, 45(13):7615-7622. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkx510 2017
M Cosentino Lagomarsino, AL Sellerio, PD Heijning, and B Bassetti, Universal features in the genome- level evolution of protein domains Genome Biology 10:R12 2009