Parsimonious Creatures: Building Gene Regulatory Networks Robust to Somatic Evolution

Averaging redundancy in duplicated gene regulatory networks in 12-celled “parsimonious creatures” uniformly slows somatic evolution, while min redundancy stalls it until neutral mutations accumulate.

• Why it matters: Somatic evolution can erode controlled cell replication, undermining early multicellular organization and remaining a key challenge for cancer control.
• What they did: The authors modeled GRN mutation in simplified 12-celled organisms that replicate from one cell to 12 cells, then stop to maximize fitness, testing minimal feedforward and step motifs and two redundancy structures.
• The result: Averaging redundancy slows divergence across somatic clonal lineages, whereas min redundancy stalls divergence until neutral mutations build up, with fitness tradeoffs as networks grow.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.