ArticleScientific reports2017
Explorability and the origin of network sparsity in living systems.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Omnidirectional Interaction Networks Modulating Phenotypic Plasticity in the Gut Microbiota Towards Ulcerative Colitis.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Stable Bacterial Cores and Patchy Eukaryotic Communities Shape the Summer Microbiomes of Patagonian Fjord Ecosystems Across Spatial, Functional and Temporal Gradients.Environmental microbiology reports · 2026Article
- Mediating role of food web structure in linking diversity to multidimensional stability: Evidence from global marine ecosystems.Science advances · 2025Article
- Topology-based metrics for finding the optimal sparsity in gene regulatory network inference.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Mapping relationships among gross motor skills in 16,989 children using network analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
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- Scaling approaches and macroecology provide a foundation for assessing ecological resilience in the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Network Statistics of the Whole-Brain Connectome ofbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Sparse species interactions reproduce abundance correlation patterns in microbial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Entropy as a Geometrical Source of Information in Biological Organizations.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Review
- Inferring multilayer interactome networks shaping phenotypic plasticity and evolution.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Genetic dissection of growth trajectories in forest trees: From FunMap to FunGraph.Forestry research · 2021Review
- A Multilayer Interactome Network Constructed in a Forest Poplar Population Mediates the Pleiotropic Control of Complex Traits.Frontiers in genetics · 2021Article
- Next Generation Networks: Featuring the Potential Role of Emerging Applications in Translational Oncology.Journal of clinical medicine · 2019Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analysing different data sets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction networks, we find that these networks are sparse, i.e. the percentage of the active interactions scales inversely proportional to the system size. To explain the origin of this puzzling common characteristic, we introduce the new concept of explorability: a measure of the ability of an interacting system to adapt to newly intervening changes. We show that sparsity is an emergent property resulting from optimising both explorability and dynamical robustness, i.e. the capacity of the system to remain stable after perturbations of the underlying dynamics. Networks with higher connectivities lead to an incremental difficulty to find better values for both the explorability and dynamical robustness, associated with the fine-tuning of the newly added interactions. A relevant characteristic of our solution is its scale invariance, i.e., it remains optimal when several communities are assembled together. Connectivity is also a key ingredient in determining ecosystem stability and our proposed solution contributes to solving May's celebrated complexity-stability paradox.
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