Year: 1986
Type: article
Abstract: Robustness is an important concept within the biological world.We might define it by the small variance of a state of the subject, e.g.health, fitness or phenotype, against changes in the underlying working conditions compared to the variance of other possible states against the same changes.Robustness differs from other concepts like stability and adaptivity (returning to a desired state), persistence, recovery and flexibility by its intrinsic structural components.Robustness may include topics like stability (small state perturbations lead to only small state changes) or structural stability (small structural parameter changes lead to a new system with the same qualitative behaviour), but include more aspects like organisation and architecture of a system, the offset between function, possible functional changes and architecture, and topics like the controversy between adaptivity and identity, i.e. plasticity vs. stability.In our context we are mostly interested in mechanisms of robustness in the molecular biological world.We are interested in phenotypic robustness, i.e. the robustness of biological entities against changes in the underlying environmental and genetic mechanisms.There are two main robustness principles known in literature: canalization and neutrality.
Author: Rüdiger Brause
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W935610660