Title: The centrality of cancer proteins in human protein-protein interaction network: a revisit

Authors: Wei Xiong; Luyu Xie; Shuigeng Zhou; Hui Liu; Jihong Guan

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China ' School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China ' School of Computer Science and Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China ' The Research Lab of Information Management, Changzhou University, Changzhou, Jiangsu 213164, China ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

Abstract: Topological analysis of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks has been widely applied to the investigation on cancer mechanisms. However, there is still a debate on whether cancer proteins exhibit more topological centrality compared to the other proteins in the human PPI network. To resolve this debate, we first identified four sets of human proteins, and then mapped these proteins into the yeast PPI network by homologous genes. Finally, we compared these proteins' properties in human and yeast PPI networks. Experiments over two real datasets demonstrated that cancer proteins tend to have higher degree and smaller clustering coefficient than non-cancer proteins. Experimental results also validated that cancer proteins have larger betweenness centrality compared to the other proteins on the STRING dataset. However, on the BioGRID dataset, the average betweenness centrality of cancer proteins is larger than that of disease and control proteins, but smaller than that of essential proteins.

Keywords: protein-protein interaction; human PPI networks; cancer proteins; network topological centrality; yeast PPI networks; clustering coefficient.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCBDD.2014.061643

International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2014 Vol.7 No.2/3, pp.146 - 156

Published online: 21 Oct 2014 *

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