Network parameters for various types of combinatorial control within cells.

*Vaqueriza et al. [51] estimate 1,700–1,800 human transcription factors.•Other estimates for the number of human genes are in the range 20,000–25,000.†Friedman et al. [40] estimate 58% of genes are targeted by miRNA (11,890 = .58*20,500).‡Cohen et al. [52] estimate 30% of human proteins are phosphoryated (6,150 = .30*20,500).The ratio of controllers per target drawn from the literature is similar across different types of biological network in humans, approximately 8%. Node properties differ between the literature and network databases owing to incomplete information in the databases. Link density is the ratio of the number of actual links to the number of possible links. Shared targets per controller and pairwise overlap are measurements of overlapping target sets described in the Text S1, section S1.3. SD = standard deviation, CV = coefficient of variation.