Signatures of currency vertices

Abstract

Many real-world networks have broad degree distributions. For some systems, this means that the functional significance of the vertices is also broadly distributed, in other cases the vertices are equally significant, but in different ways. One example of the latter case is metabolic networks, where the high-degree vertices -- the currency metabolites -- supply the molecular groups to the low-degree metabolites, and the latter are responsible for the higher-order biological function, of vital importance to the organism. In this paper, we propose a generalization of currency metabolites to currency vertices. We investigate the network structural characteristics of such systems, both in model networks and in some empirical systems. In addition to metabolic networks, we find that a network of music collaborations and a network of e-mail exchange could be described by a division of the vertices into currency vertices and others.