@article{ZakharovaKurthsVadivasovaetal.2011, author = {Zakharova, Anna and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen and Vadivasova, Tatyana and Koseska, Aneta}, title = {Analysing dynamical behavior of cellular networks via stochastic bifurcations}, series = {PLoS one}, volume = {6}, journal = {PLoS one}, number = {5}, publisher = {PLoS}, address = {San Fransisco}, issn = {1932-6203}, doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0019696}, pages = {12}, year = {2011}, abstract = {The dynamical structure of genetic networks determines the occurrence of various biological mechanisms, such as cellular differentiation. However, the question of how cellular diversity evolves in relation to the inherent stochasticity and intercellular communication remains still to be understood. Here, we define a concept of stochastic bifurcations suitable to investigate the dynamical structure of genetic networks, and show that under stochastic influence, the expression of given proteins of interest is defined via the probability distribution of the phase variable, representing one of the genes constituting the system. Moreover, we show that under changing stochastic conditions, the probabilities of expressing certain concentration values are different, leading to different functionality of the cells, and thus to differentiation of the cells in the various types.}, language = {en} } @article{SrinivasanSenthilkumarMuralietal.2011, author = {Srinivasan, K. and Senthilkumar, Dharmapuri Vijayan and Murali, K. and Lakshmanan, Muthusamy and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Synchronization transitions in coupled time-delay electronic circuits with a threshold nonlinearity}, series = {Chaos : an interdisciplinary journal of nonlinear science}, volume = {21}, journal = {Chaos : an interdisciplinary journal of nonlinear science}, number = {2}, publisher = {American Institute of Physics}, address = {Melville}, issn = {1054-1500}, doi = {10.1063/1.3591791}, pages = {11}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Experimental observations of typical kinds of synchronization transitions are reported in unidirectionally coupled time-delay electronic circuits with a threshold nonlinearity and two time delays, namely feedback delay tau(1) and coupling delay tau(2). We have observed transitions from anticipatory to lag via complete synchronization and their inverse counterparts with excitatory and inhibitory couplings, respectively, as a function of the coupling delay tau(2). The anticipating and lag times depend on the difference between the feedback and the coupling delays. A single stability condition for all the different types of synchronization is found to be valid as the stability condition is independent of both the delays. Further, the existence of different kinds of synchronizations observed experimentally is corroborated by numerical simulations and from the changes in the Lyapunov exponents of the coupled time-delay systems.}, language = {en} } @article{HempelKoseskaKurthsetal.2011, author = {Hempel, Stefan and Koseska, Aneta and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen and Nikoloski, Zoran}, title = {Inner composition alignment for inferring directed networks from short time series}, series = {Physical review letters}, volume = {107}, journal = {Physical review letters}, number = {5}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, address = {College Park}, issn = {0031-9007}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.054101}, pages = {4}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Identifying causal links (couplings) is a fundamental problem that facilitates the understanding of emerging structures in complex networks. We propose and analyze inner composition alignment-a novel, permutation-based asymmetric association measure to detect regulatory links from very short time series, currently applied to gene expression. The measure can be used to infer the direction of couplings, detect indirect (superfluous) links, and account for autoregulation. Applications to the gene regulatory network of E. coli are presented.}, language = {en} } @article{HempelKoseskaNikoloskietal.2011, author = {Hempel, Sabrina and Koseska, Aneta and Nikoloski, Zoran and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Unraveling gene regulatory networks from time-resolved gene expression data - a measures comparison study}, series = {BMC bioinformatics}, volume = {12}, journal = {BMC bioinformatics}, number = {1}, publisher = {BioMed Central}, address = {London}, issn = {1471-2105}, doi = {10.1186/1471-2105-12-292}, pages = {26}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Background: Inferring regulatory interactions between genes from transcriptomics time-resolved data, yielding reverse engineered gene regulatory networks, is of paramount importance to systems biology and bioinformatics studies. Accurate methods to address this problem can ultimately provide a deeper insight into the complexity, behavior, and functions of the underlying biological systems. However, the large number of interacting genes coupled with short and often noisy time-resolved read-outs of the system renders the reverse engineering a challenging task. Therefore, the development and assessment of methods which are computationally efficient, robust against noise, applicable to short time series data, and preferably capable of reconstructing the directionality of the regulatory interactions remains a pressing research problem with valuable applications. Results: Here we perform the largest systematic analysis of a set of similarity measures and scoring schemes within the scope of the relevance network approach which are commonly used for gene regulatory network reconstruction from time series data. In addition, we define and analyze several novel measures and schemes which are particularly suitable for short transcriptomics time series. We also compare the considered 21 measures and 6 scoring schemes according to their ability to correctly reconstruct such networks from short time series data by calculating summary statistics based on the corresponding specificity and sensitivity. Our results demonstrate that rank and symbol based measures have the highest performance in inferring regulatory interactions. In addition, the proposed scoring scheme by asymmetric weighting has shown to be valuable in reducing the number of false positive interactions. On the other hand, Granger causality as well as information-theoretic measures, frequently used in inference of regulatory networks, show low performance on the short time series analyzed in this study. Conclusions: Our study is intended to serve as a guide for choosing a particular combination of similarity measures and scoring schemes suitable for reconstruction of gene regulatory networks from short time series data. We show that further improvement of algorithms for reverse engineering can be obtained if one considers measures that are rooted in the study of symbolic dynamics or ranks, in contrast to the application of common similarity measures which do not consider the temporal character of the employed data. Moreover, we establish that the asymmetric weighting scoring scheme together with symbol based measures (for low noise level) and rank based measures (for high noise level) are the most suitable choices.}, language = {en} } @article{DongesDonnerTrauthetal.2011, author = {Donges, Jonathan Friedemann and Donner, Reik Volker and Trauth, Martin H. and Marwan, Norbert and Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Nonlinear detection of paleoclimate-variability transitions possibly related to human evolution}, series = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America}, volume = {108}, journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America}, number = {51}, publisher = {National Acad. of Sciences}, address = {Washington}, issn = {0027-8424}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.1117052108}, pages = {20422 -- 20427}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Potential paleoclimatic driving mechanisms acting on human evolution present an open problem of cross-disciplinary scientific interest. The analysis of paleoclimate archives encoding the environmental variability in East Africa during the past 5 Ma has triggered an ongoing debate about possible candidate processes and evolutionary mechanisms. In this work, we apply a nonlinear statistical technique, recurrence network analysis, to three distinct marine records of terrigenous dust flux. Our method enables us to identify three epochs with transitions between qualitatively different types of environmental variability in North and East Africa during the (i) Middle Pliocene (3.35-3.15 Ma B. P.), (ii) Early Pleistocene (2.25-1.6 Ma B. P.), and (iii) Middle Pleistocene (1.1-0.7 Ma B. P.). A deeper examination of these transition periods reveals potential climatic drivers, including (i) large-scale changes in ocean currents due to a spatial shift of the Indonesian throughflow in combination with an intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation, (ii) a global reorganization of the atmospheric Walker circulation induced in the tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean, and (iii) shifts in the dominating temporal variability pattern of glacial activity during the Middle Pleistocene, respectively. A reexamination of the available fossil record demonstrates statistically significant coincidences between the detected transition periods and major steps in hominin evolution. This result suggests that the observed shifts between more regular and more erratic environmental variability may have acted as a trigger for rapid change in the development of humankind in Africa.}, language = {en} } @article{GrimbsArnoldKoseskaetal.2011, author = {Grimbs, Sergio and Arnold, Anne and Koseska, Aneta and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen and Selbig, Joachim and Nikoloski, Zoran}, title = {Spatiotemporal dynamics of the Calvin cycle multistationarity and symmetry breaking instabilities}, series = {Biosystems : journal of biological and information processing sciences}, volume = {103}, journal = {Biosystems : journal of biological and information processing sciences}, number = {2}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {Oxford}, issn = {0303-2647}, doi = {10.1016/j.biosystems.2010.10.015}, pages = {212 -- 223}, year = {2011}, abstract = {The possibility of controlling the Calvin cycle has paramount implications for increasing the production of biomass. Multistationarity, as a dynamical feature of systems, is the first obvious candidate whose control could find biotechnological applications. Here we set out to resolve the debate on the multistationarity of the Calvin cycle. Unlike the existing simulation-based studies, our approach is based on a sound mathematical framework, chemical reaction network theory and algebraic geometry, which results in provable results for the investigated model of the Calvin cycle in which we embed a hierarchy of realistic kinetic laws. Our theoretical findings demonstrate that there is a possibility for multistationarity resulting from two sources, homogeneous and inhomogeneous instabilities, which partially settle the debate on multistability of the Calvin cycle. In addition, our tractable analytical treatment of the bifurcation parameters can be employed in the design of validation experiments.}, language = {en} } @article{HuangChenKurths2011, author = {Huang, Tingwen and Chen, Guanrong and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Synchronization of chaotic of chaotic systems with time-varying coup{\"o}ing delays}, series = {Discrete and continuous dynamical systems : a journal bridging mathematics and sciences ; Series B, Mathematical modelling, analysis and computations}, volume = {16}, journal = {Discrete and continuous dynamical systems : a journal bridging mathematics and sciences ; Series B, Mathematical modelling, analysis and computations}, number = {4}, publisher = {American Institute of Mathematical Sciences}, address = {Springfield}, issn = {1531-3492}, doi = {10.3934/dcdsb.2011.16.1071}, pages = {1071 -- 1082}, year = {2011}, abstract = {In this paper, we study the complete synchronization of a class of time-varying delayed coupled chaotic systems using feedback control. In terms of Linear Matrix Inequalities, a sufficient condition is obtained through using a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and differential equation in equalities. The conditions can be easily verified and implemented. We present two simulation examples to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.}, language = {en} } @article{KoseskaVolkovKurths2011, author = {Koseska, Aneta and Volkov, Evgenii and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Synthetic multicellular oscillatory systems controlling protein dynamics with genetic circuits}, series = {Physica scripta : an international journal for experimental and theoretical physics}, volume = {84}, journal = {Physica scripta : an international journal for experimental and theoretical physics}, number = {4}, publisher = {IOP Publ. Ltd.}, address = {Bristol}, issn = {0031-8949}, doi = {10.1088/0031-8949/84/04/045007}, pages = {10}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Synthetic biology is a relatively new research discipline that combines standard biology approaches with the constructive nature of engineering. Thus, recent efforts in the field of synthetic biology have given a perspective to consider cells as 'programmable matter'. Here, we address the possibility of using synthetic circuits to control protein dynamics. In particular, we show how intercellular communication and stochasticity can be used to manipulate the dynamical behavior of a population of coupled synthetic units and, in this manner, finely tune the expression of specific proteins of interest, e.g. in large bioreactors.}, language = {en} } @article{DongesDonnerRehfeldetal.2011, author = {Donges, Jonathan Friedemann and Donner, Reik Volker and Rehfeld, Kira and Marwan, Norbert and Trauth, Martin H. and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Identification of dynamical transitions in marine palaeoclimate records by recurrence network analysis}, series = {Nonlinear processes in geophysics}, volume = {18}, journal = {Nonlinear processes in geophysics}, number = {5}, publisher = {Copernicus}, address = {G{\"o}ttingen}, issn = {1023-5809}, doi = {10.5194/npg-18-545-2011}, pages = {545 -- 562}, year = {2011}, abstract = {The analysis of palaeoclimate time series is usually affected by severe methodological problems, resulting primarily from non-equidistant sampling and uncertain age models. As an alternative to existing methods of time series analysis, in this paper we argue that the statistical properties of recurrence networks - a recently developed approach - are promising candidates for characterising the system's nonlinear dynamics and quantifying structural changes in its reconstructed phase space as time evolves. In a first order approximation, the results of recurrence network analysis are invariant to changes in the age model and are not directly affected by non-equidistant sampling of the data. Specifically, we investigate the behaviour of recurrence network measures for both paradigmatic model systems with non-stationary parameters and four marine records of long-term palaeoclimate variations. We show that the obtained results are qualitatively robust under changes of the relevant parameters of our method, including detrending, size of the running window used for analysis, and embedding delay. We demonstrate that recurrence network analysis is able to detect relevant regime shifts in synthetic data as well as in problematic geoscientific time series. This suggests its application as a general exploratory tool of time series analysis complementing existing methods.}, language = {en} }