2010/10/18 by Christian Schneider, Schneider, Christian M., Roberto F. S. Andrade +5
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #Computational Drug Discovery Methods #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Gene Regulatory Network Analysis #Molecular Networks (q-bio.MN) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1010.3531
openalex publication_date 2010/10/18 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The capacity to resist attacks from the environment is crucial to the survival of all organisms. We quantitatively analyze the susceptibility of protein interaction networks of numerous organisms to random and malicious attacks. We find for all organisms studied that random rewiring improves protein network robustness, so that actual networks are more fragile than rewired surrogates. This unexpected fragility contrasts with the behavior of networks such as the Internet, whose robustness decreases with random rewiring. We trace this surprising effect to the modular structure of protein networks.