Biomolecular Network Controllability With Drug Binding Information

Complex networks are ubiquitous in nature. In biological systems, biomolecules interact with each other to form so-called biomolecular networks, which determine the cellular behaviors of living organisms. Controlling the cellular behaviors by regulating certain biomolecules in the network is one of the most concerned problems in systems biology. Recently, the connections between biological networks and structural control theory have been explored, uncovering some interesting biological phenomena. Some researchers have paid attentions to the structural controllability of networks in notion of the minimum steering sets (MSSs). However, because the MSSs for complex networks are not unique and the importance of different MSSs is diverse in real applications, MSSs with certain meanings should be studied. In this paper, we investigated the MSSs of biomolecular networks by considering the drug binding information. The biomolecules in the MSSs with binding preference are enriched with known drug targets and are likely to have more chemical-binding opportunities with existing drugs compared with randomly chosen MSSs, suggesting novel applications for drug target identification and drug repositioning.