Essential protein identification based on essential protein-protein interaction prediction by integrated edge weights

Abstract

Essential proteins are crucial to cellular survival and development. Traditionally, essential proteins are identified by knock-out experiments, which are expensive and often fatal to the target organisms. Regarding this, an important approach to essential protein identification is through computational prediction. In this research, we present a novel computational method, Integrated Edge Weights (IEW), to innovatively predict proteins' essentiality based on essential protein-protein interactions. The experimental results on all three organisms: Saccharomyces cere-visiae (Yeast), Escherichia coli (E. coli), and Caenorhabditis ele-gans (C. elegans) show that IEW achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision-recall. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that the highly-ranked protein-protein interactions predicted by our approach tend to be biologically significant in Yeast, E. coli, and C. elegans proteinprotein interaction (PPI) networks.