The dominance of the population by a selected few: power-law behaviour applies to a wide variety of genomic properties.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The sequencing of genomes provides us with an inventory of the 'molecular parts' in nature, such as protein families and folds, and their functions in living organisms. Through the analysis of such inventories, it has been shown that different genomes have very different usage of parts; for example, the common folds in the worm are very different from those in Escherichia coli.

Results

Despite these differences, we find that the genomic occurrence of generalized parts follows a well-known mathematical framework called the power law, with a few parts occurring many times and most occurring only a few times. This observation is true in a wide variety of genomic contexts. Earlier studies found power laws in a few specific cases, such as the occurrence of protein fami

SUBMITTER: Luscombe NM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC126234 | biostudies-literature | 2002 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature