DISTRIBUTION ANALYSIS IN METABOLIC NETWORKS: Power Laws

Sangya Pundir¹, Somnath Tagore²*
¹Department of Biotechnology & Bioinformatics, Dr D Y Patil University, Plot 50, Sec 15, CBD Belapur, Navi Mumbai 400614, India
²Department of Biotechnology & Bioinformatics, Dr D Y Patil University, Plot 50, Sec 15, CBD Belapur, Navi Mumbai 400614, India
* Corresponding Author : somnathtagore@yahoo.co.in

Received : -     Accepted : -     Published : 15-06-2009
Volume : 1     Issue : 1       Pages : 1 - 4
Adv Inform Min 1.1 (2009):1-4

Keywords : Power law, degree, rank, metabolic networks, graph theory, log-log scale.
Conflict of Interest : None declared

Many new structural patterns have been discovered in diverse biological, social and information networks. One of them are metabolic networks, the most widely studied large scale networks in biology, known to have a power law degree distribution and the exponent _ is observed to be the same for all species. However, empirical evidence elucidating the nature of the process that gives rise to such structure is lacking this far. In this paper we review facts about power law distribution as relevant to metabolic networks. In particular we concentrate on the evolutionary and other implications of such a power law distribution.

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