title: Pervasive robustness in biological systems.
abstract: Robustness is characterized by the invariant expression of a phenotype in the face of a genetic and/or environmental perturbation. Although phenotypic variance is a central measure in the mapping of the genotype and environment to the phenotype in quantitative evolutionary genetics, robustness is also a key feature in systems biology, resulting from nonlinearities in quantitative relationships between upstream and downstream components. In this Review, we provide a synthesis of these two lines of investigation, converging on understanding how variation propagates across biological systems. We critically assess the recent proliferation of studies identifying robustness-conferring genes in the context of the nonlinearity in biological systems.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biology of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, CNRS UMR8197, INSERM U124, ENS, 46 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Marie-Anne
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Félix
authors.affiliation: Imperial College London, Department of Life Sciences, Sir Alexander Fleming Building, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK.
authors.forename: Michalis
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Barkoulas
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D004777:Environment; D014644:Genetic Variation; D008954:Models, Biological; D010641:Phenotype; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods*