  The next step in the understanding of the genome organization, after the
determination of complete sequences, involves proteomics. The proteome includes
the whole set of protein-protein interactions, and two recent independent
studies have shown that its topology displays a number of surprising features
shared by other complex networks, both natural and artificial. In order to
understand the origins of this topology and its evolutionary implications, we
present a simple model of proteome evolution that is able to reproduce many of
the observed statistical regularities reported from the analysis of the yeast
proteome. Our results suggest that the observed patterns can be explained by a
process of gene duplication and diversification that would evolve proteome
networks under a selection pressure, favoring robustness against failure of its
individual components.
