  Molecular chaperones play a prominent role in signaling and transcriptional
regulatory networks of the cell. Recent advances uncovered that chaperones act
as genetic buffers stabilizing the phenotype of various cells and organisms and
may serve as potential regulators of evolvability. Chaperones have weak links,
connect hubs, are in the overlaps of network modules and may uncouple these
modules during stress, which gives an additional protection for the cell at the
network-level. Moreover, after stress chaperones are essential to re-build
inter-modular contacts by their low affinity sampling of the potential
interaction partners in different modules. This opens the way to the
chaperone-regulated modular evolution of cellular networks, and helps us to
design novel therapeutic and anti-aging strategies.
