Topological Properties in Metabolic Functional Module of Transcriptional Regulatory Networksd

Recently, a plenty of intriguing topological structure features of transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs) have been revealed under the perspectives of network science. However, it is still unclear about the function modular structure of TRNs that control metabolic physiological processes. Therefore, we extracted the metabolic transcriptional regulatory network (MTRN) and ten metabolism-related modules from TRNs of representative prokaryotes (Escherichia coli) and eukaryotes (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) from GeneProtEC, MIPS and GO databases according to hierarchy function directory. We also presented an exhaustive topological analysis of the new extracted network and modules, focusing on the statistical characterization of degree, closeness, betweenness, clustering coefficient and assortativities of them. From the results in this paper, we conclude that the MTRN and TRN have similar topological properties, and both are scale-free with small world effect and hierarchical modularity.