Master regulators of biological systems in higher dimensions

A longstanding goal of biology is to identify the key genes and species that critically impact evolution, ecology, and health. Network analysis has revealed keystone species that regulate ecosystems and master regulators that regulate cellular genetic networks. Yet these studies have focused on pairwise biological interactions, which can be affected by the context of genetic background and other species present generating higher-order interactions. The important regulators of higher-order interactions are unstudied. To address this, we apply methods from polyhedral geometry to quantify epistasis in a fitness landscape to ask how individual genes and species influence the interactions in the rest of the biological network.

Joint work with Holger Eble, Lisa Lamberti, and William B. Ludington.