Structure-Dynamics Relationships in Biological Networks

Biological systems at all scales of organization display exceptional abilities to coordinate complex behaviors to balance stability and adaptability in a variable environment and to process information for mounting diverse, yet specific responses. Such emergent macroscopic behaviors are governed by complex systems of interactions. Understanding how the structure of such interactions determines global dynamics is a major challenge in complex systems theory. Traditionally this problem has been approached by defining statistics that quantify some aspect of structure or dynamics of complex systems. Such an analysis has helped to gain insight into the manner how particular structural properties such as topology constrains dynamical behavior. However, a drawback of this analysis is that established relationships between structural properties and dynamical bahaviour are specific to the measure, and thus hold only on this single aspect. Thus, it is difficult to establish more general principles. To overcome these limitations we propose to use information theory to establish a unified framework through which one can begin to examine both structure and dynamics of complex systems in a general manner.