Q:
I was wondering if you could help me.
I read your interesting article " The Importance of Bottlenecks in
Protein Networks: Correlation with Gene Essentiality and Expression
Dynamics".

I have trouble understanding the definition of hubs and bottlenecks (We
defined hubs as all proteins that are in the top 20% of the degree
distribution (i.e., proteins that have the 20% highest number of neighbors).
Accordingly, we defined
bottlenecks as the proteins that are in the top 20% in terms of
betweenness.. )

For example: if we want to calculate proteins that are in top 10% of degree
distributions, in a PPI network with 1000 nodes, we consider 100 highest
degree nodes?

or

we calculate 10% of the highest degree, which is for example 700 and
proteins with degree above 630 are the hubs?

Which one of these interpretations are correct?

A:
Your first interpretation is correct, i.e., if there are 1000 proteins in the network, we consider the top 100 proteins with the highest degrees.