New Paper: Biological Network Evolution

Our paper “Wiring between close nodes in molecular networks evolves more quickly than between distant nodes” has now been published as advance access in Molecular Biology and Evolution. We propose to use the evolution of drug-drug interaction scores as a proxy for the evolution of the topology of the underlying biological networks of a bacterial cell. We test this idea by using data from a previous study that measured thousands of these scores for dual drug combinations across species. Mapping biological networks in detail is enormously costly experimentally, while mapping drug-drug interactions is much cheaper and there is evidence that such interactions depend on network topology. Our main result is that drug-drug interactions that are synergistic tend to be closer in E. coli biological networks, and these interactions tend to evolve faster than nodes that are far apart in the network.