Data from: Landscape of epithelial–mesenchymal plasticity as an emergent property of coordinated teams in regulatory networks

Elucidating the design principles of regulatory networks driving cellular
decision-making has fundamental implications in mapping and eventually
controlling cell-fate decisions. Despite being complex, these regulatory
networks often only give rise to a few phenotypes. Previously, we
identified two “teams” of nodes in a small cell lung cancer regulatory
network that constrained the phenotypic repertoire and aligned strongly
with the dominant phenotypes obtained from network simulations (Chauhan et
al., 2021). However, it remained elusive whether these “teams” exist in
other networks and how they shape the phenotypic landscape. Here, we
demonstrate that five different networks of varying sizes governing
epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity, comprised of two “teams” of players –
one comprised of canonical drivers of epithelial phenotype and the other
containing the mesenchymal inducers. These “teams” are specific to the
topology of these regulatory networks and orchestrate a bimodal phenotypic
landscape with the epithelial and mesenchymal phenotypes being more
frequent and dynamically robust to perturbations, relative to the
intermediary/hybrid epithelial/ mesenchymal ones. Our analysis reveals
that network topology alone can contain information about corresponding
phenotypic distributions, thus obviating the need to simulate them. We
propose “teams” of nodes as a network design principle that can drive
cell-fate canalization in diverse decision-making processes.