The Modular Structure of Protein Networks

The evolution of the human protein homology network (H-PHN) has led to a complex network that exhibits a surprisingly high level of modularity. Topologically, the H-PHN presents well connected groups (conformed by proteins of similar aminoacid structure) and weak connectivities between the groups. Here, we perform an empirical study of the H-PHN to characterize the degree of modularity in terms of scale-invariant laws using recently introduced box covering algorithms. We find that the exponent that determines the scale-invariance of the modularity is unexpectedly higher than the box dimension of the network. In addition, we perform a percolation analysis that gives insight into the evolutionary process that led to the modular organization and dynamics of the present H-PHN.