Figure 11

The joint deletion of the intrinsic edges of a pattern instance may synergistically reduce connections between genes in the E. coli , S. cerevisiae and Mammals networks. The pairwise disconnectivity index of a pattern instance (motifs are drawn as red triangles, others as black circles) is outlined on the y-axis. By contrast, the x-axis denotes the fraction of gene pairs becoming disconnected upon the deletion of a single intrinsic edge, summarized for all intrinsic edges of a given pattern instance. The diagonal dotted lines indicate the cases when the impact of the concurrent elimination of all intrinsic edges of a pattern instance does not differ from the sum of impacts provided by the separate removal of the same edges. Hence, pattern instances that are drawn below these lines include intrinsic edges that have an overlapping in their impacts: they can disconnect the same gene pairs. Finally, the position of a pattern instance above the dotted lines shows that some of its intrinsic edges are parts of alternative (i.e., parallel) paths between two genes. Such genes do not become disconnected when only one intrinsic edge is eliminated, but some of them do upon simultaneous removal of all intrinsic edges of the pattern instance: i.e., the joint removal exerts a higher than merely additive effect.