Metabolomics is an expanding discipline in biology. It is the process of portraying the phenotype of a cell, tissue or species organism using a comprehensive set of metabolites. Therefore, it is of interest to understand complex systems such as metabolomics using a scale-free topology. Genetic networks and the World Wide Web (WWW) are described as networks with complex topology. Several large networks have vertex connectivity that goes beyond a scale-free power-law distribution. It is observed that (a) networks expand constantly by the addition of recent vertices, and (b) recent vertices attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected. Scalefree networks are determined with precision using vital features such as a structure, a disease and a patient. This is pertinent to the understanding of complex systems such as metabolomics. Hence, we describe the relevance of scale-free networks in the understanding of metabolomics in this article.
Keywords: complex systems; metabolites; metabolomics; modelling; pathways; scale-free networks.