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Science 298 (5594): 824-827

Copyright © 2002 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Network Motifs: Simple Building Blocks of Complex Networks

R. Milo,1 S. Shen-Orr,1 S. Itzkovitz,1 N. Kashtan,1 D. Chklovskii,2 U. Alon1*

Complex networks are studied across many fields of science. To uncover their structural design principles, we defined "network motifs," patterns of interconnections occurring in complex networks at numbers that are significantly higher than those in randomized networks. We found such motifs in networks from biochemistry, neurobiology, ecology, and engineering. The motifs shared by ecological food webs were distinct from the motifs shared by the genetic networks of Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae or from those found in the World Wide Web. Similar motifs were found in networks that perform information processing, even though they describe elements as different as biomolecules within a cell and synaptic connections between neurons in Caenorhabditis elegans. Motifs may thus define universal classes of networks. This approach may uncover the basic building blocks of most networks.

1 Departments of Physics of Complex Systems and Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel 76100.
2 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724, USA.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: urialon{at}weizmann.ac.il

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