Drug Target Identification Based on Structural Output Controllability of Complex Networks

摘要

Identifying drug target is one of the most important tasks in systems biology. In this paper, we develop a method to identify drug targets in biomolecular networks based on the structural output controllability of complex networks. The drug target identification has been formulated as a problem of finding steering nodes in networks. By applying control signals to these nodes, the biomolecular networks can be transited from one state to another. According to the control theory, a graph-theoretic algorithm has been proposed to find a minimum set of steering nodes in biomolecular networks which can be a potential set of drug targets. An illustrative example shows how the proposed method works. Application results of the method to real metabolic networks are supported by existing research results.