Genetic pathway
Encyclopedia
A genetic pathway is the set of interactions occurring between a group of genes
Gênes
Gênes is the name of a département of the First French Empire in present Italy, named after the city of Genoa. It was formed in 1805, when Napoleon Bonaparte occupied the Republic of Genoa. Its capital was Genoa, and it was divided in the arrondissements of Genoa, Bobbio, Novi Ligure, Tortona and...

 who depend on each other's individual functions in order to make the aggregate function of the network available to the cell. Commonly, pathways are shown using the same graphical conventions as graph theory
Graph theory
In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...

 with individual genes being presented as nodes or vertices
Vertex (graph theory)
In graph theory, a vertex or node is the fundamental unit out of which graphs are formed: an undirected graph consists of a set of vertices and a set of edges , while a directed graph consists of a set of vertices and a set of arcs...

 in the image while the informational interactions between genes are indicated by drawn lines commonly referred to as graph edges
Graph theory
In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...

 or graph connections.

A genetic mutation
Mutation
In molecular biology and genetics, mutations are changes in a genomic sequence: the DNA sequence of a cell's genome or the DNA or RNA sequence of a virus. They can be defined as sudden and spontaneous changes in the cell. Mutations are caused by radiation, viruses, transposons and mutagenic...

disrupting the function of one gene in a pathway breaks the informational connection between genes acting before and after the mutant gene. Similar to a break in a phone line between two cities, it is often possible that the two groups of isolated genes will still have some within group communication even though they have lost the ability to have complete pathway activity.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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