Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Macroscales, Resilience, and Criticality in Protein Networks

Anshuman Swain

University of Michigan

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks are fundamental to understanding cellular processes, as they represent the physical interactions between proteins that drive biological function. However, these networks are complex and exhibit noise and degeneracy, making their analysis challenging. This talk will explore the emergence of informative macroscales in PPI networks and the factors influencing their resilience. Macroscales are associated with lower noise and degeneracy, and nodes participating in them are more resilient, suggesting an evolutionary adaptation. The talk will also examine the degree distributions of PPI networks and their relationship to power law distributions, exploring how these findings indicate that the networks are poised at near-criticality. Overall, this talk will highlight the importance of analyzing biological networks at multiple scales and provides insights into the relationship between network structure, resilience, and evolution.