Overlapping complexes detection within protein interaction networks using improved genetic algorithm

Abstract

BackgroundThe protein complexes detection has an important role in analyzing biological processes and understanding life at the cellular level. Although many complex detection algorithms have been proposed by employing specific topological attributes of protein interaction networks, most of them focus on detecting separated protein complexes, where each protein can belong to only one complex. Generally, many protein interaction networks have many complexes or modules that are often overlapped with each other. Developing overlapping protein complex detection algorithm thus becomes necessary. MethodsIn this respect, this paper proposes a new overlapping detection algorithm based on GA (Genetic Algorithm) to discover overlapping protein complexes. The proposed algorithm is supplied with a new local search operator based on gene ontology annotations in order to direct the search process towards discovering overlapping protein complexes that are hyper-connected and biologically related. The proposed algorithm is assessed on two gold standard and real-world datasets. ResultsThe result attained shows that the proposed algorithm can detect important overlapping protein complexes, and presents more accurate results compared to the state-of-the-art overlapping protein complexes detection algorithms. ConclusionsThe superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared with other counterpart algorithms is attributed to the fact that the proposed algorithm is a population based stochastic search algorithm which efficiently explored the search landscape to capture dense overlapping subgraphs by employing the topological properties of network, and then enhancing the obtained solution by investing gene ontology information in developing a new local search operator inside the GA framework.