A novel graph clustering method with a greedy heuristic search algorithm for mining protein complexes from dynamic and static PPI networks

Abstract

Discovering protein complexes from protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks is one of the primary tasks in bioinformatics. However, most of the state-of-the-art methods still face some challenges, such as the inability to discover overlapping protein complexes, failure to consider the inherent structure of real protein complexes, and non-utilization of biological information. Based on the above mentioned aspects, we present a novel graph clustering method with a greedy heuristic search algorithm for mining protein complexes using a new clustering model in dynamic and static weighted PPI networks (named MPC-C). First, MPC-C constructed dynamic and static weighted PPI networks by combining biological and topological information. Second, initial clusters were obtained using core and multifunctional proteins, following which we proposed a greedy heuristic search algorithm to expand each initial cluster and form candidate protein complexes in dynamic and static weighted PPI networks. Finally, unreliable and highly overlapping protein complexes were discarded. To demonstrate the performance of MPC-C, we tested this method on five PPI networks and compared it with nine other effective methods. The experimental results indicate that MPC-C outperformed the other state-of-the-art methods with respect to various computational and biologically relevant metrics.