Protein Interaction Networks are Fragile against Random Attacks and Robust against Malicious Attacks

摘要

The capacity to resist attacks from the environment is crucial to thesurvival of all organisms. We quantitatively analyze the susceptibility ofprotein interaction networks of numerous organisms to random and maliciousattacks. We find for all organisms studied that random rewiring improvesprotein network robustness, so that actual networks are more fragile thanrewired surrogates. This unexpected fragility contrasts with the behavior ofnetworks such as the Internet, whose robustness decreases with random rewiring.We trace this surprising effect to the modular structure of protein networks.