Deteccion y caracterizacion de nuevos reguladores moleculares del ciclo celular de la planta modelo arabidopsis thaliana mediante analisis topologicos de una red de coexpresion y de una red de interaccion proteia-proteina.

after the post-genomics era, the understanding of the biological systems has been revolutionized. Paradigms have shifted from the mechanistic view of the cellular behavior and properties to the systemic comprehension of life. a holistic perspective that covers from cells to ecosystems. With this research project, a systemic analysis, from the network topology perspective, of the core machinery that regulates cell cycle progression in the model plant arabidopsis thaliana is attempted. The analysis of two different network types (coexpression network and protein-protein interaction network) will allow us to get information regarding different regulation levels (gene level and protein level) of the cell cycle progression, which in turns, can shed some light into the evolutionary properties that, during time, have structured the core cell cycle machinery in arabidopsis. The cellular functionality in time and space is an emerging system property which can be only reached when the different cellular elements interact precisely and coordinately. Due to this, the understanding of the interaction networks among system´s elements, give additional information about the dynamical structure of the system that cannot be provided by the system´s parts as isolated units. In opposition, the topological characterization of a network can be useful to elucidate specific nodes with particular characteristics which are fundamental for the network structure and concomitantly, for the stability of the system. By means of a topological analysis of the arabidopsis thaliana cell cycle core machinery, we want to detect the regulatory elements (genes and proteins) that are fundamental for the cell cycle progression in this model plant. This approach can validate some elements that have been already described as key elements for the cell cycle progress, but definitely, will detect new ones from a systemic perspective. Some of the detected key nodes will be analyzed experimentally by using arabidopsis mutants in order to complement the topological in silico analysis, with a wet-lab approach that can validate the results here obtained.