Is the intrinsic disorder of proteins the cause of the scale-free architecture of protein-protein interaction networks?

Schnell, Santiago; Fortunato, Santo; Roy, Sourav

Is the intrinsic disorder of proteins the cause of the scale-free architecture of protein-protein interaction networks?

Authors

Schnell, Santiago

Fortunato, Santo

Roy, Sourav

Description

In protein-protein interaction networks certain topological properties appear to be recurrent: networks maps are considered scale-free. It is possible that this topology is reflected in the protein structure. In this paper we investigate the role of protein disorder in the network topology. We find that the disorder of a protein (or of its neighbors) is independent of its number of protein-protein interactions. This result suggests that protein disorder does not play a role in the scale-free architecture of protein networks.
15 pages, 2 figures