A valuable advantage of such network-based approaches is that the relative importance of specific genes can be assessed in part, by the context of their surrounding interactions. There is a continuously growing body of evidence suggesting that hub genes are of particular importance to genetic networks. For example, introducing null mutations into hub genes negatively impacted the hardiness of Escherichia coli to a much greater extent than did mutations of randomly selected genes [72]. This may be explained by an observation made in Caenorhabditis elegans, showing that hub genes participated in a variety of canonical signaling pathways [73]. In a genetic network study of mouse liver, hypothalamus and adipose tissue, hub genes were also found to be highly connected nodes across all three expression datasets [74]. In the results presented here, we too found that many hub genes in basal networks maintained hub status within ErGeN's as well (Figures 4 and 6).
