Biological Network Analysis and Synthesis for Symmetry

Dear Colleagues,

The biological phenomena related to the term symmetry—or asymmetry—should stimulate researcher interest. These phenomena are observed in various fields. Schrödinger suggested that a life system takes orderliness from its environment and sustains itself at a fairly high level of orderliness. First, the environment which is the world of nature itself changes irreversibly, paraphrased as asymmetrically in time. Topics of interest can be exemplified as the following. Plants exhibit a reversible or irreversible response according to environmental stresses. Signal transmission from an animal eye to a visual cortex eventually became symmetric during the process of evolution and is easily modified (i.e., becomes asymmetric) due to an environmental perturbation. Rooney et al. suggested structural asymmetry enhances the stability of diverse food webs. Gardner et al. developed a genetic toggle switch with a symmetric network structure in Escherichia coli. The last example demonstrates that symmetry should be a design target in synthetic biology.

The Guest Editor of this Special Issue invites research articles and reviews on these topics in the broad area of science and engineering, in which symmetry and asymmetry play a significant role, such as (though not restricted to) omics analysis for reversible or irreversible process in plant environmental stress response; symmetric properties in network development in neural systems; reversible or irreversible process models for biological regulatory systems (e.g., orderliness in a biological network); symmetric structure in genome sequences; synthetic biology for symmetric biological networks; symmetry or asymmetry in ecosystems; symmetric configuration and conformation in drug design; biomechanics and robotics for symmetrical movement. Theoretical or computational studies as well as method papers are also welcomed.

Prof. Dr. Katsumi Sakata
Prof. Dr. Ning Zhong
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Symmetry is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• omics analysis
• neural system
• reversible or irreversible biological process
• biological network
• ecosystem model
• symmetry in drug design
• engineering for biological symmetry
• brain informatics