Frequency-rank Distributions in Proteomics

This paper analyzes the protein abundances in 8 organisms to determine if they fit any of a number of commonly-seen distributions in frequency-rank analyses, with the intention of drawing analogies between biochemistry and linguistics. The organisms were chosen so as to be representative and come from a wide range of body complexities. Our analysis suggests that while individual organisms fit certain distributions quite well, there is no overarching thread that unifies the protein distributions found across the living world, at least on the scale of individual proteins.