ArticlePLoS computational biology2015
Evolution of bow-tie architectures in biology.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed.
- Asymmetric responses to resource overload: a bow-tie perspective on lake eutrophication and human obesity.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Review
- Simple biological controllers drive the evolution of soft modes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Bridging developmental and statistical approaches to variation and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Consciousness: its goals, its functions and the emergence of a new category of selection.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Intrinsic health as a foundation for a science of health.Science advances · 2025Review
- Soft Modes as a Predictive Framework for Low-Dimensional Biological Systems Across Scales.Annual review of biophysics · 2025Review
- Article
- Article
- Bridging the activation gap: a physical activity intensity scale informed by elite athletes yet inclusive for musculoskeletal pain patients.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2025Article
- Non-negative connectivity causes bow-tie architecture in neural circuits.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2025Article
- Soft Modes as a Predictive Framework for Low Dimensional Biological Systems across Scales.ArXiv · 2024Article
- A transcriptomic hourglass in brown algae.Nature · 2024Article
- Revisiting the evolution of bow-tie architecture in signaling networks.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- The HmrABCX pathway regulates the transition between motile and sessile lifestyles inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- The Yeast Protein Kinase Sch9 Functions as a Central Nutrient-Responsive Hub That Calibrates Metabolic and Stress-Related Responses.Journal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Bow-tie architectures in biological and artificial neural networks: Implications for network evolution and assay design.iScience · 2023Article
- Information Theory as an Experimental Tool for Integrating Disparate Biophysical Signaling Modules.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- A complex systems approach to aging biology.Nature aging · 2022Review
- The hidden simplicity of metabolic networks is revealed by multireaction dependencies.Science advances · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Bow-tie or hourglass structure is a common architectural feature found in many biological systems. A bow-tie in a multi-layered structure occurs when intermediate layers have much fewer components than the input and output layers. Examples include metabolism where a handful of building blocks mediate between multiple input nutrients and multiple output biomass components, and signaling networks where information from numerous receptor types passes through a small set of signaling pathways to regulate multiple output genes. Little is known, however, about how bow-tie architectures evolve. Here, we address the evolution of bow-tie architectures using simulations of multi-layered systems evolving to fulfill a given input-output goal. We find that bow-ties spontaneously evolve when the information in the evolutionary goal can be compressed. Mathematically speaking, bow-ties evolve when the rank of the input-output matrix describing the evolutionary goal is deficient. The maximal compression possible (the rank of the goal) determines the size of the narrowest part of the network-that is the bow-tie. A further requirement is that a process is active to reduce the number of links in the network, such as product-rule mutations, otherwise a non-bow-tie solution is found in the evolutionary simulations. This offers a mechanism to understand a common architectural principle of biological systems, and a way to quantitate the effective rank of the goals under which they evolved.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.