Evolution of small-world topologies in an artificial genetic regulatory network model

Despite growing evidence of the prevalence and importance of small-world topologies in genetic regulatory networks, the mechanisms by which they form and persist have remained an open question. Using the artificial genome model as a framework for describing genetic regulatory networks, we propose a segmental duplication and divergence model, and distill the question of evolving small-world topologies into two simulation experiments that show: (1) the generation methods of the networks, such as segmental duplication and divergence, play an important role in this process; (2) the natural selection of the networks can accelerate the process of small-world formation.