A Computational Taxonomy of Transport Failure in Coupled Biological Networks

A Computational Taxonomy of Transport Failure in Coupled Biological Networks presents a multi-layer computational framework for classifying how biological transport systems degrade, reroute, congest, and adapt under damage. Synthesizing seven prior computational twins across tissue, follicular, sensory, and microtubule-scale systems, the paper separates transport into four measurable layers: diffusive spread, spatial routing, temporal dynamics, and adaptive compensation. The study introduces routing-sensitive metrics (RCI/FRCI), identifies distinct transport-failure phenotypes (bottleneck, fragmentation, modular partition, intrinsic decay, and regime shift), and demonstrates that adaptive responses differ fundamentally across architectures. Importantly, the framework does not claim universality; instead, it proposes a portable diagnostic taxonomy for studying transport failure in coupled biological networks. All findings are computational, falsifiable, and accompanied by explicit provenance, sensitivity analysis, and preserved negative results.