Title: Scaling properties of transcription profiles in gene networks

Authors: Renata C. Ferreira, Francisco Bosco, Marcelo R.S. Briones

Addresses: Departamento de Microbiologia, Imunologia e Parasitologia, Federal University of Sao Paulo, Ed. Ciencias Biomedicas, Rua Botucatu, 862 Sao Paulo, SP 04023-062, Brazil. ' Departamento de Microbiologia, Imunologia e Parasitologia, Federal University of Sao Paulo, Ed. Ciencias Biomedicas, Rua Botucatu, 862 Sao Paulo, SP 04023-062, Brazil. ' Departamento de Microbiologia, Imunologia e Parasitologia, Federal University of Sao Paulo, Ed. Ciencias Biomedicas, Rua Botucatu, 862 Sao Paulo, SP 04023-062, Brazil

Abstract: Here we show that the transcriptional noise is an emergent property with scale invariance from genome level to the level of small Transcriptional Regulatory Genetic Networks (TRGN). We show that a small set of 9-12 genes reproduces the geometric mean value of transcriptional noise of the largest percolating networks and the whole 93-gene wide TRGN sub-network. Our results predict that the collapse of the standard deviation of the transcriptional noise as a function of gene sub-networks connectivity should occur for 1000 genes, the approximate size of the maximal interconnected percolating network cluster, which corresponds to the minimal genome size.

Keywords: housekeeping functions; transcriptional noise; behavioural variability; TRGN; transcriptional regulatory genetic networks; bioinformatics; gene networks; transcription profiles; regulatory networks; genome size; scale invariance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2009.024035

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2009 Vol.5 No.2, pp.178 - 186

Published online: 24 Mar 2009 *

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