The Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry

Network motifs in natural and artificial transcriptional regulatory networks

Wolfgang Banzhaf and P. Dwight Kuo

We show that network motifs found in natural regulatory networks may also be found in an artificial regulatory network model created through a duplication/divergence process. It is shown that these network motifs exist more frequently in a genome created through the aforementioned process than in randomly generated genomes. These results are then compared with a network motif analysis of the gene expression networks of Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In addition, it is shown that certain individual network motifs may arise directly from the duplication/divergence mechanism.