Scaling laws in the functional content of genomes
Biological Physics
2007-05-23 v1 Genomics
Abstract
With the number of sequenced genomes now over one hundred, and the availability of rough functional annotations for a substantial proportion of their genes, it has become possible to study the statistics of gene content across genomes. Here I show that, for many high-level functional categories, the number of genes in the category scales as a power-law in the total number of genes in the genome. The occurrence of such scaling laws can be explained with a simple theoretical model, and this model suggests that the exponents of the observed scaling laws correspond to universal constants of the evolutionary process. I discuss some consequences of these scaling laws for our understanding of organism design.
Cite
@article{arxiv.physics/0307001,
title = {Scaling laws in the functional content of genomes},
author = {Erik van Nimwegen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0307001},
year = {2007}
}