Least dissipation cost as a design principle for robustness and function of cellular networks.

From a study of the budding yeast cell cycle, we found that the cellular network evolves to have the least cost for realizing its biological function. We quantify the cost in terms of the dissipation or heat loss characterized through the steady-state properties: the underlying landscape and the associated flux. We found that the dissipation cost is intimately related to the stability and robustness of the network. With the least dissipation cost, the network becomes most stable and robust under mutations and perturbations on the sharpness of the response from input to output as well as self-degradations. The least dissipation cost may provide a general design principle for the cellular network to survive from the evolution and realize the biological function.