TY - JOUR AU - Ren, Yuanfang AU - Ay, Ahmet AU - Dobra, Alin AU - Kahveci, Tamer PY - 2019 DA - 2019/06/20 TI - Characterizing building blocks of resource constrained biological networks JO - BMC Bioinformatics SP - 318 VL - 20 IS - 12 AB - Identification of motifs–recurrent and statistically significant patterns–in biological networks is the key to understand the design principles, and to infer governing mechanisms of biological systems. This, however, is a computationally challenging task. This task is further complicated as biological interactions depend on limited resources, i.e., a reaction takes place if the reactant molecule concentrations are above a certain threshold level. This biochemical property implies that network edges can participate in a limited number of motifs simultaneously. Existing motif counting methods ignore this problem. This simplification often leads to inaccurate motif counts (over- or under-estimates), and thus, wrong biological interpretations. SN - 1471-2105 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-019-2838-x DO - 10.1186/s12859-019-2838-x ID - Ren2019 ER -