Properties of metabolic graphs: biological organization or representation artifacts?

ABSTRACT:

Background

Standard graphs, where each edge links two nodes, have been extensively used to represent the connectivity of metabolic networks. It is based on this representation that properties of metabolic networks, such as hierarchical and small-world structures, have been elucidated and null models have been proposed to derive biological organization hypotheses. However, these graphs provide a simplistic model of a metabolic network's connectivity map, since metabolic reactions often involve more than two reactants. In other words, this map is better represented as a hypergraph. Consequently, a question that naturally arises in this context is whether these properties truly reflect biological organization or are merely an artifact of the representation.

Results

In this pape

SUBMITTER: Zhou W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3098788 | biostudies-literature | 2011 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature