Manuscript for Review Resilience of Protein Contact Networks

Given the peculiar structure of the proteins, composed by a folded chain of aminoacids, that establish non-covalent link due to the bundling, the use of Complex Network theory to describe them is gaining momentum rapidly among the scientific community. Among the others, Protein Contact Networks are an effective tool to capture the complexity of such structures. In this paper we provide a preliminary study on the resilience of such networks by simulating a selective disruption of nodes, according to both traditional and protein-specific topological indicators. Specifically, we provide a case study on Human Serum Albumin, and we define an indicator to compare the results of the different strategies. are an effective tool to represent the non-covalent links generated by protein folding (Fig. 1). In this paper, based on the preliminary results in [1], we provide an estimate of resilience of such networks following the approach in [5], by considering the response of such networks to attacks on vertices selected following topological criteria.