Global information processing in gene networks: Fault tolerance

In this paper we study the fault tolerance of gene networks. We assume single gene knockouts and investigate the effect this kind of perturbation has on the communication between genes globally. For our study we use directed scale-free networks resembling gene networks, e.g., signaling or protein-protein interaction networks, and define a Markov process based on the network topology to model communication. This allows us to evaluate the spread of information in the network and, hence, detect differences due to single gene knockouts in the gene-gene communication asymptotically.