Identification of protein complexes in protein-protein interaction networks by core-attachment approach incorporating gene expression profile

Abstract

Due to the advancement in Proteomic technologies, bulk data of protein-protein interactions (PPI) are available which give researchers in bioinformatics the opportunity to explore and understand biological properties and structure from a networking perspective. Identification of protein complexes is a challenge that has emerged as an attraction to researchers particularly in computational biology. Various computational approaches were developed to identify protein complexes in PPI networks. In this paper, we give a new method based on the core-attachment approach with incorporation of gene expression data known as core-attachment with gene (CAG) expression to identify protein complexes in PPI networks. Experiment results support that our method CAG can detect protein complexes effectively. Validation by biological information, namely co-localisation and gene ontology semantic similarity score reveals that the complexes predicted by our method has high biological relevance. We also give a comparison of our method with four other popular methods in the field.