Finding cancer's weakest link

Finding cancer's weakest link

The biological programs of vertebrates exhibit a remarkable degree of functional degeneracy, adaptive compensation and robustness, to preserve homeostasis and generate reproducible phenotypic outputs irrespective of variations in signal strength, noise and quality. Cancers are difficult to treat not only because they are so mechanistically diverse but also because they adapt or evolve in respon...

Online Catalogs: Finding the Weakest Link

Finding the weakest link: exploring integrin-mediated mechanical molecular pathways.

From the extracellular matrix to the cytoskeleton, a network of molecular links connects cells to their environment. Molecules in this network transmit and detect mechanical forces, which subsequently determine cell behavior and fate. Here, we reconstruct the mechanical pathway followed by these forces. From matrix proteins to actin through integrins and adaptor proteins, we review how forces a...

Who's The Weakest Link?

In this paper we consider the following problem: Given a network G, determine if there is an edge in G through which at least c shortest paths pass. This problem arises naturally in various practical situations where there is a massive network (telephone, internet), and routing of data is done via shortest paths and one wants to identify most congested edges in the network. This problem can be ...

Cooperative weakest link games

We introduce Weakest Link Games (WLGs), a cooperative game modeling domains where a team’s value is determined by its weakest member. The game is represented as an edgeweighted graph with designated source and target vertices, where agents are the edges. The quality of a path between the source vertex and target vertex is the minimal edge weight along the path; the value of a coalition of edges...