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Life cycles of successful genes
By exploring time-series data from MEDLINE
abstracts, we observe that only a few genes have been quoted
with increasing frequency during the past 25 years. This is
probably the result of selective pressure by the scientific
community. Over the years, this selection has produced an
extreme power law distribution of the information available
for individual genes. Interestingly, those genes that are
successfully selected are not necessarily the most important
genes to the cell. To stress the implication of this finding
we show that there is no correlation between a gene's impact
in the scientific literature and its centrality
in protein-interaction networks.
Hoffmann, R., Valencia,
A. Life cycles of successful genes. Trends Genet. 19(2), 79-81.
(2003).
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