Emergence of power law distributions in protein-protein interaction networks through study bias was published in eLife on December 11, 2024. Here, we show that the degree distribution in PPI networks might just follow a power law because of study bias and technical bias. It is, hence, problematic to derive hypotheses about the topology of the true biological interactome from the PL distributions in observed PPI networks. Our study casts doubt on the use of the PL property of biological networks as a modeling assumption or quality criterion in network biology.
Emergence of power law distributions in protein-protein interaction networks through study bias was published in eLife on December 11, 2024. Here, we show that the degree distribution in PPI networks might just follow a power law because of study bias and technical bias. It is, hence, problematic to derive hypotheses about the topology of the true biological interactome from the PL distributions in observed PPI networks. Our study casts doubt on the use of the PL property of biological networks as a modeling assumption or quality criterion in network biology.