@inproceedings {PUBARCH54,
	title = {Analysis of Gene Regulatory Network Motifs in Evolutionary Development of Multicellular Organisms},
	author = {Lisa Schramm AND Vander Valente Martins AND Yaochu Jin AND Bernhard Sendhoff},
	year = {2010},
	month = {August},
	abstract = {Biological development is governed by gene regulatory networks (GRNs), although detailed genetic and cellular mechanisms underlying biological development remain unclear. It is believed that some GRN motifs have played an important role in the evolution of biological development by means of analyzing biological data. In this work, we investigate in a computational model for development to verify if these motifs can also be evolved as in biology, which can not only help understand biological development and improve simulated evolution as well. The goal of the evolution is to evolve an elongated body plan using a cellular developmental model controlled by a GRN. We count the number of network motifs during the evolution and try to relate the changes of these network motifs to the fitness profile of the evolution. We find for the number of most motifs an increase in the beginning of the evolution and a decrease again as the evolution proceeds.
We hypothesize that at the beginning a high number different motifs is helpful for the evolution, however, motifs that are not used for the targeted development, i.e., an elongated body morphology in this work, will get lost later on. In addition, we also examine two individuals before and after a fitness jump to analyze which genetic changes have contributed to the large fitness improvement.},
	publisher = {IEEE (ALIFE)},
	booktitle = {Twelfth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems}
}