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Optimal network topology for responsive collective behavior.

ABSTRACT: Animals, humans, and multi-robot systems operate in dynamic environments, where the ability to respond to changing circumstances is paramount. An effective collective response requires suitable information transfer among agents and thus critically depends on the interaction network. To investigate the influence of the network topology on collective response, we consider an archetypal model of distributed decision-making and study the capacity of the system to follow a driving signal for varying topologies and system sizes. Experiments with a swarm of robots reveal a nontrivial relationship between frequency of the driving signal and optimal network topology. The emergent collective response to slow-changing perturbations increases with the degree of the interaction network, but the opposite is true for the response to fast-changing ones. These results have far-reaching implications for the design and understanding of distributed systems: a dynamic rewiring of the interaction network is essential to effective collective operations at different time scales.

SUBMITTER: Mateo D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6447377 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Optimal network topology for responsive collective behavior.

Mateo David D Horsevad Nikolaj N Hassani Vahid V Chamanbaz Mohammadreza M Bouffanais Roland R

Science advances 20190403 4

Animals, humans, and multi-robot systems operate in dynamic environments, where the ability to respond to changing circumstances is paramount. An effective collective response requires suitable information transfer among agents and thus critically depends on the interaction network. To investigate the influence of the network topology on collective response, we consider an archetypal model of distributed decision-making and study the capacity of the system to follow a driving signal for varying ...[more]

PMID: 30949570

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Project description:BackgroundModules of interacting components arranged in specific network topologies have evolved to perform a diverse array of cellular functions. For a network with a constant topological structure, its function within a cell may still be tuned by changing the number of instances of a particular component (e.g., gene copy number) or by modulating the intrinsic biochemical properties of a component (e.g., binding strength or catalytic efficiency). How such perturbations affect cellular response dynamics remains poorly understood. Here, we explored these effects in a common decision-making motif, cross-antagonism with autoregulation, by synthetically constructing this network in yeast.ResultsWe employed the engineering design strategy of reuse to build this topology with a single protein building block, TetR, creating necessary components through TetR mutations and fusion partners. We then studied the impact of several topology-preserving perturbations - strength of cross-antagonism, number of operator sites in a promoter, and gene dosage - on decision-making behavior. We found that reducing TetR repression strength, which hinders cross-antagonism, resulted in a loss of mutually exclusive cell responses. Unexpectedly, increasing the number of operator sites also impeded decision-making exclusivity, which may be a consequence of the averaging effect that arises when multiple transcriptional activators and repressors are accommodated at a given locus. Stochastic simulations of this topology revealed that, even for networks with high TetR repression strength and a low number of operator sites, increasing gene dosage can reduce exclusivity in response dynamics. We further demonstrated this result experimentally by quantifying gene copy numbers in selected yeast clones with differing phenotypic responses.ConclusionsOur study illustrates how parameters that do not change the topological structure of a decision-making network can nonetheless exert significant influence on its response dynamics. These findings should further inform the study of native motifs, including the effects of topology-preserving mutations, and the robust engineering of synthetic networks.

Dataset Information

Optimal network topology for responsive collective behavior.

Publications

Optimal network topology for responsive collective behavior.

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