Evolutionary processes of many complex networks in reality are dominated by duplication and divergence. This mechanism leads to redundant structures, i.e. some nodes share most of their neighbors and some local patterns are similar, called redundancy of network. An interesting reverse problem is to discover evolutionary information from the present topological structure. We propose a quantitative measure of redundancy of network from the perspective of principal component analysis. The redundancy of a community in the empirical human metabolic network is negatively and closely related with its evolutionary age, which is consistent with that for the communities in the modeling protein–protein network. This behavior can be used to find the evolutionary difference stored in cellular networks.
Impacts of yeast metabolic network structure on enzyme evolution