Giulia Menichetti - Università degli Studi di Bologna #
Network Entropy measures and their applications to 
different systemic perturbations of cell basal state #
<p>
The entropy of network ensembles SNE is related to the number of 
possible networks 
that satisfy some chosen constraints. Once given a real network, 
its main important 
features are encoded as constraints upon network ensembles.  A 
high value of SNE
means that a large number of networks satisfy the given 
constraints, thus the set of 
features associated to the observed network is not very 
particular (i.e. informative 
from an information theory point of view). On the contrary, for 
low entropy values, 
only few configurations can satisfy the given constraints, and 
there are less degrees of 
freedom.
</p>
<p>
We applied this measure to different biological designs 
(case-control and time series 
studies) where the parameter space represents the cell states. A 
high value SNE
becomes usually associated to a high degree of plasticity for the 
system in this case, 
since a wide range of parameter values (e.g. gene expression 
profiles) are allowed 
to the cell. On the other hand, a low value of SNE can be 
interpreted as 1) the system 
has been more finely tuned or 2) the system has a smaller range 
available to its 
parameters
</p>
<br/>
<p>In collaboration with: G. Bianconi, E. Giampieri, G. Castellani and D. Remondini</p>