Modeling the topology of protein interaction networks.

A major issue in biology is the understanding of the interactions between proteins. These interactions can be described by a network, where the proteins are modeled by nodes and the interactions by edges. The origin of these protein networks is not well understood yet. Here we present a two-step model, which generates clusters with the same topological properties as networks for protein-protein interactions, namely, the same degree distribution, cluster size distribution, clustering coefficient, and shortest path length. The biological and model networks are not scale-free but exhibit small-world features. The model allows the fitting of different biological systems by tuning a single parameter.