Distribution Analysis in Metabolic Networks: Power Laws

Many new structural patterns have been discovered in diverse biological, social and information networks. One of them aremetabolic networks, the most widely studied large scale networks in biology, known to have a power law degree distribution and theexponent is observed to be the same for all species. However, empirical evidence elucidating the nature of the process that gives rise tosuch structure is lacking this far. In this paper we review facts about power law distribution as relevant to metabolic networks. In particularwe concentrate on the evolutionary and other implications of such a power law distribution.