Heterogeneous distribution of metabolites across plant species

Kazuhiro Takemoto and Masanori Arita

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2009, vol. 388, issue 13, 2771-2780

Abstract: We investigate the distribution of flavonoids, a major category of plant secondary metabolites, across species. Flavonoids are known to show high species specificity, and were once considered as chemical markers for understanding adaptive evolution and characterization of living organisms. We investigate the distribution among species using bipartite networks, and find that two heterogeneous distributions are conserved among several families: the power-law distributions of the number of flavonoids in a species and the number of shared species of a particular flavonoid. In order to explain the possible origin of the heterogeneity, we propose a simple model with, essentially, a single parameter. As a result, we show that two respective power-law statistics emerge from simple evolutionary mechanisms based on a multiplicative process. These findings provide insights into the evolution of metabolite diversity and characterization of living organisms that defy genome sequence analysis for different reasons.

Keywords: Flavonoid; Metabolism; Power law; Bipartite graph model; Evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:388:y:2009:i:13:p:2771-2780

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2009.03.011

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