Self-similar scale-free networks and disassortativity

Self-similar networks with scale-free degree distribution have recently attracted much attention, since these apparently incompatible properties were reconciled in [C. Song, S. Havlin, and H. A. Makse, Nature 433, 392 (2005)] by an appropriate box-counting method that enters the measurement of the fractal dimension. We study two genetic regulatory networks (Saccharomyces cerevisiae [N. M. Luscombe, M. M. Babu, H. Yu, M. Snyder, S. Teichmann, and M. Gerstein, Nature 431, 308 (2004)] and Escherichia coli [http://www.ccg.unam.mx/Computational_Genomics/regulondb/DataSets/RegulonNetDataSets.html and http://www.gbf.de/SystemsBiology]) and show their self-similar and scale-free features, in extension to the datasets studied by [C. Song, S. Havlin, and H. A. Makse, Nature 433, 392 (2005)]. Moreover, by a number of numerical results we support the conjecture that self-similar scale-free networks are not assortative. From our simulations so far these networks seem to be disassortative instead. We also find that the qualitative feature of disassortativity is scale-invariant under renormalization, but it appears as an intrinsic feature of the renormalization prescription, as even assortative networks become disassortative after a sufficient number of renormalization steps.