When Biological networks are no longer scale free.

Speaker:  Teresa M.Przytycka
Time:  May 25, 2004, 11:00 am B2 seminar room.

Recent studies of properties of various biological networks revealed 
that many of them display scale free characteristics. Since the theory 
of scale free networks is applicable to evolving networks, one can hope 
that it provides not only a model of a biological network in its 
current state but also sheds some insight into the evolution of the 
network. 

In this talk I will start with an introduction to the world of scale 
free networks, the motivation behind this concept, it’s power and 
limitations.  Subsequently, I will focus on two evolutionary models for 
domain similarity network and argue that models which include 
evolutionary drift are typically not scale free. Instead they adhere 
quite closely to the Yule distribution.  
This finding indicates that the direct applicability of scale free 
models in understanding the evolution of biological networks may not be 
as wide as it has been hoped for.