User:Haley thil/sandbox

Mutational Robustness in Crucial Systems
There is a difference between the way that robustness effects an organism at the genotypic level and the phenotypic level. When considering the genotypic level, mutational robustness is negatively correlated with adaptability. The more robust an organism, the less mutations change its functionality, and the more likely it is to remain unchanged. This ability to maintain functionality can be very important to some systems because they do not need to change. Certain processes are so highly developed, that a mutation causing a change may be more harmful to the functionality of the organism than the original process. This is why at the genotypic level, mutational robustness is an advantageous quality to have. Mutational robustness can reduce the amount of changes that occur to a system by maintaing functionality despite a large number of mutations. Robustness in vital systems and processes is necessary to maintain survival. Gene Regulatory Networks are robust because their function is important to keep many organisms alive. The more areas that a Regulatory network has influence over, the more robust it will become. This is because they tend to have an indirect effect on other genes and proteins that it is not directly involved with, and so it must maintain its function to prevent a domino effect of negative changes on other parts of an organism's systems. Because of this, dimer networks are much more robust than monomeric networks. Protein structures and functions are also kept robust to maintain functionality. The high stability of proteins makes it responsible to resisting change from mutations, and the large population size makes them more resistant to change. Many parts of the genome are also kept robust because their value is so high to the overall survival of an organism.