Hierarchical modularity of nested bow-ties in metabolic networks

Background: The exploration of the structural topology and the organizing principles of genomebased large-scale metabolic networks is essential for studying possible relations between structure and functionality of metabolic networks. Topological analysis of graph models has often been applied to study the structural characteristics of complex metabolic networks. Results: In this work, metabolic networks of 75 organisms were investigated from a topological point of view. Network decomposition of three microbes (Escherichia coli, Aeropyrum pernix and Saccharomyces cerevisiae) shows that almost all of the sub-networks exhibit a highly modularized bow-tie topological pattern similar to that of the global metabolic networks. Moreover, these small bow-ties are hierarchically nested into larger ones and collectively integrated into a large metabolic network, and important features of this modularity are not observed in the random shuffled network. In addition, such a bow-tie pattern appears...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Jing Zhao, Hong Yu, Jianhua Luo, Zhi-Wei Cao, Yi-Xue Li
• Keywords: BMCBI 2006, Complex Metabolic Networks, Large-scale Metabolic Networks, Metabolic Networks