Symmetry and Dynamics in living organisms: The self-similarity principle governs gene expression dynamics

The ambitious and ultimate research purpose in Systems Biology is the understanding and modelling of the cell’s system. Although a vast number of models have been developed in order to extract biological knowledge from complex systems composed of basic elements as proteins, genes and chemical compounds, a need remains for improving our understanding of dynamical features of the systems (i.e., temporal-dependence). In this article, we analyze the gene expression dynamics (i.e., how the genes expression fluctuates in time) by using a new constructive approach. This approach is based on only two fundamental ingredients: symmetry and the Markov property of dynamics. First, by using experimental data of human and yeast gene expression time series, we ∗These authors contributed equally to this work. Corresponding authors: [email protected], [email protected]