Circuits with broken fibration symmetries perform core logic computations in biological networks

Abstract

We show that logic computational circuits in gene regulatory networks arise from a fibration symmetry breaking in the network structure. From this idea we implement a constructive procedure that reveals a hierarchy of genetic circuits, ubiquitous across species, that are surprising analogues to the emblematic circuits of solid-state electronics: starting from the transistor and progressing to ring oscillators, current-mirror circuits to toggle switches and flip-flops. These canonical variants serve fundamental operations of synchronization and clocks (in their symmetric states) and memory storage (in their broken symmetry states). These conclusions introduce a theoretically principled strategy to search for computational building blocks in biological networks, and present a systematic route to design synthetic biological circuits.

References in corpus (2)

• Fibration symmetries uncover the building blocks of biological networks
• Symmetry group factorization reveals the structure-function relation in the neural connectome of Caenorhabditis elegans

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Predicting synchronized gene coexpression patterns from fibration symmetries in gene regulatory networks in bacteria
• Symmetry-driven network reconstruction through pseudobalanced coloring optimization
• Fast algorithm to identify cluster synchrony through fibration symmetries in large information-processing networks
• Quasifibrations of Graphs to Find Symmetries in Biological Networks
• Approximate Network Symmetry
• Designing topological cluster synchronization patterns with the Dirac operator