Abstract
The identification and validation of drug targets are crucial in biomedical research and many studies have been conducted on analyzing drug target features for getting a better understanding on principles of their mechanisms. But most of them are based on either strong biological hypotheses or the chemical and physical properties of those targets separately. In this paper, we investigated three main ways to understand the functional biomolecules based on the topological features of drug targets. There are no significant differences between targets and common proteins in the protein-protein interactions network, indicating the drug targets are neither hub proteins which are dominant nor the bridge proteins. According to some special topological structures of the drug targets, there are significant differences between known targets and other proteins. Furthermore, the drug targets mainly belong to three typical communities based on their modularity. These topological features are helpful to understand how the drug targets work in the PPI network. Particularly, it is an alternative way to predict potential targets or extract nontargets to test a new drug target efficiently and economically. By this way, a drug target's homologue set containing 102 potential target proteins is predicted in the paper.
Highlights
Drug target studies have been conducted in both dry and wet labs from experimental designs to target identification and validation steps
Protein-protein interactions are a better way to understand the biological functions through systemic view, which have been widely examined in many research studies under the molecular level
We found that 5 topological indices are quite similar between drug target proteins and other proteins in the protein-protein interactions (PPI) network
Summary
Drug target studies have been conducted in both dry and wet labs from experimental designs to target identification and validation steps. The essential intentions of these approaches are trying to take the time-specific or spacespecific information into account These systems biology approaches will lead to time-sensitive, space-sensitive, and synergistic treatments taking the multidimensional use of drugs into consideration [13]. These studies mainly focused on interactions of drugs targets rather than the targets’ topological features. The targets topological features are helpful to predict new targets because most of them have similarity on some topological features which are different from normal proteins. To construct a panoramic view of drug targets, in this paper, we examined the three main institutive views about drug target characteristics: intermediaries, source of the drug stimulus, and special topological features. This paper concludes in the Conclusion with the impact of the paper and our future work insights
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
