5,739 research outputs found
Graph Theory and Networks in Biology
In this paper, we present a survey of the use of graph theoretical techniques
in Biology. In particular, we discuss recent work on identifying and modelling
the structure of bio-molecular networks, as well as the application of
centrality measures to interaction networks and research on the hierarchical
structure of such networks and network motifs. Work on the link between
structural network properties and dynamics is also described, with emphasis on
synchronization and disease propagation.Comment: 52 pages, 5 figures, Survey Pape
Examination of the relationship between essential genes in PPI network and hub proteins in reverse nearest neighbor topology
Abstract Background In many protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, densely connected hub proteins are more likely to be essential proteins. This is referred to as the "centrality-lethality rule", which indicates that the topological placement of a protein in PPI network is connected with its biological essentiality. Though such connections are observed in many PPI networks, the underlying topological properties for these connections are not yet clearly understood. Some suggested putative connections are the involvement of essential proteins in the maintenance of overall network connections, or that they play a role in essential protein clusters. In this work, we have attempted to examine the placement of essential proteins and the network topology from a different perspective by determining the correlation of protein essentiality and reverse nearest neighbor topology (RNN). Results The RNN topology is a weighted directed graph derived from PPI network, and it is a natural representation of the topological dependences between proteins within the PPI network. Similar to the original PPI network, we have observed that essential proteins tend to be hub proteins in RNN topology. Additionally, essential genes are enriched in clusters containing many hub proteins in RNN topology (RNN protein clusters). Based on these two properties of essential genes in RNN topology, we have proposed a new measure; the RNN cluster centrality. Results from a variety of PPI networks demonstrate that RNN cluster centrality outperforms other centrality measures with regard to the proportion of selected proteins that are essential proteins. We also investigated the biological importance of RNN clusters. Conclusions This study reveals that RNN cluster centrality provides the best correlation of protein essentiality and placement of proteins in PPI network. Additionally, merged RNN clusters were found to be topologically important in that essential proteins are significantly enriched in RNN clusters, and biologically important because they play an important role in many Gene Ontology (GO) processes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78257/1/1471-2105-11-505.xmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78257/2/1471-2105-11-505-S1.DOChttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78257/3/1471-2105-11-505.pdfPeer Reviewe
Revisiting Date and Party Hubs: Novel Approaches to Role Assignment in Protein Interaction Networks
The idea of 'date' and 'party' hubs has been influential in the study of
protein-protein interaction networks. Date hubs display low co-expression with
their partners, whilst party hubs have high co-expression. It was proposed that
party hubs are local coordinators whereas date hubs are global connectors. Here
we show that the reported importance of date hubs to network connectivity can
in fact be attributed to a tiny subset of them. Crucially, these few, extremely
central, hubs do not display particularly low expression correlation,
undermining the idea of a link between this quantity and hub function. The
date/party distinction was originally motivated by an approximately bimodal
distribution of hub co-expression; we show that this feature is not always
robust to methodological changes. Additionally, topological properties of hubs
do not in general correlate with co-expression. Thus, we suggest that a
date/party dichotomy is not meaningful and it might be more useful to conceive
of roles for protein-protein interactions rather than individual proteins. We
find significant correlations between interaction centrality and the functional
similarity of the interacting proteins.Comment: 27 pages, 5 main figures, 4 supplementary figure
The Physics of Communicability in Complex Networks
A fundamental problem in the study of complex networks is to provide
quantitative measures of correlation and information flow between different
parts of a system. To this end, several notions of communicability have been
introduced and applied to a wide variety of real-world networks in recent
years. Several such communicability functions are reviewed in this paper. It is
emphasized that communication and correlation in networks can take place
through many more routes than the shortest paths, a fact that may not have been
sufficiently appreciated in previously proposed correlation measures. In
contrast to these, the communicability measures reviewed in this paper are
defined by taking into account all possible routes between two nodes, assigning
smaller weights to longer ones. This point of view naturally leads to the
definition of communicability in terms of matrix functions, such as the
exponential, resolvent, and hyperbolic functions, in which the matrix argument
is either the adjacency matrix or the graph Laplacian associated with the
network. Considerable insight on communicability can be gained by modeling a
network as a system of oscillators and deriving physical interpretations, both
classical and quantum-mechanical, of various communicability functions.
Applications of communicability measures to the analysis of complex systems are
illustrated on a variety of biological, physical and social networks. The last
part of the paper is devoted to a review of the notion of locality in complex
networks and to computational aspects that by exploiting sparsity can greatly
reduce the computational efforts for the calculation of communicability
functions for large networks.Comment: Review Article. 90 pages, 14 figures. Contents: Introduction;
Communicability in Networks; Physical Analogies; Comparing Communicability
Functions; Communicability and the Analysis of Networks; Communicability and
Localization in Complex Networks; Computability of Communicability Functions;
Conclusions and Prespective
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