Network Motifs

Network motifs: simple building blocks of complex networks

R. Milo, S. Shen-Orr, S. Itzkovitz, N. Kashtan, D. Chklovskii and U. Alon · Science 298(5594), 824–827 (2002)

Read source material

Identify feed-forward loops in directed regulatory networks and understand the structural definition of network motifs.

What you will implement

Implement feed-forward-loop subgraph matching; count comparisons are not statistical significance tests and do not prove regulatory function.

• 118. Network Motifs: Detecting Feed-forward Loops in a Directed Regulatory Network

  Detect feed-forward loops in a directed regulatory network, distinguish a directed motif from an undirected triangle, and understand that motif presence is not an experimentally established regulatory function.

  Implement subgraph matching for the feed-forward loop, with a switch for induced matching; a degree-preserving randomization comparison is supplied and only compares counts.