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Eugene V. Koonin
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.

Yuri I. Wolf
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.

Georgy P. Karev
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.

About this book

Power Laws, Scale-free Networks and Genome Biology deals with crucial aspects of the theoretical foundations of systems biology, namely power law distributions and scale-free networks, which have emerged as the hallmarks of biological organization in the post-genomic era. The chapters in the book not only describe the interesting mathematical properties of biological networks but moves beyond phenomenology, toward models of evolution capable of explaining the emergence of these features. The collection of chapters, contributed by both physicists and biologists, strives to address the problems in this field in a rigorous but not excessively mathematical manner and to represent different viewpoints, which is crucial in this emerging discipline. Each chapter includes, in addition to technical descriptions of properties of biological networks and evolutionary models, a more general and accessible introduction to the respective problems. Most chapters emphasize the potential of theoretical systems biology for discovery of new biological phenomena.

Table of contents

1. Power Laws in Biological Networks
Eivind Almaas and Albert-László Barabási

2. Graphical Analysis of Biocomplex Networks and Transport Phenomena
Kwang-Il Goh, Byungnam Kahng and Doochul Kim

3. Large-Scale Topological Properties of Molecular Networks
Sergei Maslov and Kim Sneppen

4. The Connectivity of Large Genetic Networks: Design, History, or Mere Chemistry?
Andreas Wagner

5. The Drosophila Protein Interaction Network May Be neither Power-Law nor Scale-Free
J.S. Bader

6. Birth and Death Models of Genome Evolution
Georgy P. Karev, Yuri I. Wolf and Eugene V. Koonin

7. Scale-Free Evolution: From Proteins to Organisms
Nikolay V. Dokholyan and Eugene I. Shakhnovich

8. Gene Regulatory Networks
T. Gregory Dewey and David J. Galas

9. Power Law Correlations in DNA Sequences
Sergey V. Buldyrev

10. Analytical Evolutionary Model for Protein Fold Occurrence in Genomes,
Accounting for the Effects of Gene Duplication, Deletion, Acquisition
and Selective Pressure
Michael Kamal, Nicholas M. Luscombe, Jiang Qian and Mark Gerstein

11. The Protein Universes: Some Informatic Issues in Protein Classification
S. Rackovsky

12. The Role of Computation in Complex Regulatory Networks
Pau Fernández and Ricard V. Solé

13. Neutrality and Selection in the Evolution of Gene Families
Itai Yanai

14. Scaling Laws in the Functional Content of Genomes: Fundamental Constants of Evolution?
Erik van Nimwegen