Title: Proteins involved in more domain types tend to be more essential

Authors: Lu Chen; Yingjiao Cheng; Min Li; Jianxin Wang

Addresses: School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China

Abstract: Investigation of essential proteins is significantly valuable for understanding of cellular life, drug design and other practical purposes. In most of current studies, essential proteins are generally mined in protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks with diverse topology features. In this study, we investigate what kind of proteins is inclined to be essential from a new perspective. The investigation implies that protein essentiality is correlated with protein domains, which are functional, structural and evolutionary units of proteins. Proteins with a larger Number of Domain Types (NDT) tend to be essential. The analyses on 22 species show that essential proteins identified by NDT are much more than those identified by ten random identifications. The consideration of the structural feature makes us less dependent on network data and thus enables us to investigate protein essentiality of more species with incomplete and/or inconsistent network data.

Keywords: essential proteins; protein-protein interaction networks; PPI; domain types; bioinformatics; incomplete data; inconsistent data.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2015.068086

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2015 Vol.11 No.2, pp.91 - 110

Received: 07 May 2013
Accepted: 28 May 2013
Published online: 17 Mar 2015 *

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