Robustness perspective on network-based prediction of gene essentiality

Essential genes are the genes that are indispensable to cell viability. It is very important to ascertain these genes for understanding the biological phenomena, as well as drug and therapy design. In the present paper, we understand the essential and nonessential genes from the perspective of robustness. Other than traditional homology study based methods, this article use structural analysis of functional subsystems of genome-scale metabolic networks. We give the structural analysis of the citric acid cycle as a case study, the result suggests that this systems-oriented method would help to ascertain gene essentiality.