ArticleGenome biology2002
The dominance of the population by a selected few: power-law behaviour applies to a wide variety of genomic properties.
Article in Genome biology, 2002. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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37 citing papers in PubMed, 121 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Grammar of protein domain architectures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Finite-size effects in transcript sequencing count distribution: its power-law correction necessarily precedes downstream normalization and comparative analysis.Biology direct · 2018Article
- Global organization of a binding site network gives insight into evolution and structure-function relationships of proteins.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Size distribution of function-based human gene sets and the split-merge model.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- New insights into the evolutionary rate of hepatitis B virus at different biological scales.Journal of virology · 2015Article
- UniRef clusters: a comprehensive and scalable alternative for improving sequence similarity searches.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2015Article
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- Env-less endogenous retroviruses are genomic superspreaders.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2012Article
- Large-scale dynamics of horizontal transfers.Mobile genetic elements · 2012Article
- Mapping small molecule binding data to structural domains.BMC bioinformatics · 2012Article
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- Scaling properties of protein family phylogenies.BMC evolutionary biology · 2011Article
- Algebraic distribution of segmental duplication lengths in whole-genome sequence self-alignments.PloS one · 2011Article
- Fractal topology of gene promoter networks at phase transitions.Gene regulation and systems biology · 2010Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe sequencing of genomes provides us with an inventory of the 'molecular parts' in nature, such as protein families and folds, and their functions in living organisms. Through the analysis of such inventories, it has been shown that different genomes have very different usage of parts; for example, the common folds in the worm are very different from those in Escherichia coli.
resultsDespite these differences, we find that the genomic occurrence of generalized parts follows a well-known mathematical framework called the power law, with a few parts occurring many times and most occurring only a few times. This observation is true in a wide variety of genomic contexts. Earlier studies found power laws in a few specific cases, such as the occurrence of protein families. Here, we find many further cases of power-law behavior, for example in the occurrence of pseudogenes and in levels of gene expression. We show comprehensively that this behavior applies across many different genomes, for many different types of parts (DNA words, InterPro families, protein superfamilies and folds, pseudogene families and pseudomotifs), and for the many disparate attributes associated with these parts (their functions, interactions and expression levels).
conclusionsPower-law behavior provides a concise mathematical description of an important biological feature: the sheer dominance of a few members over the overall population. We present this behavior in a unified framework and propose that all these observations are connected to an underlying DNA duplication process as genomes evolved to their current state.
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