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Properties of protein-protein interaction networks

Life's complexity pyramid:

figure from Oltvai, Z.N. and Barabasi A.-L. (2002) Life's complexity pyramid. Science 298, 763.

Principle: from the particular to the universal:

- each organism is unique in its repertoire of components: (genes, metabolites, proteins)

- e.g. 43 organisms only share ~4% of their metabolites (Jeong et al. (2000) Nature 407, 651.

- but modules are shared across species, and even more so the scale-free nature of the network's large-scale organization:

Common building blocks make up complex networks (Milo et al. (2002) Network motifs: simple building blocks of complex networks. Sicence 298, 824-827)

[this applies not only to protein-protein networks but all other types of networks as well, e.g. transcription]