A lock-and-key model for protein-protein interactions

Motivation: Protein-protein interaction networks are one of the major post-genomic data sources available to molecular biologists. They provide a comprehensive view of the global interaction structure of an organism's proteome, as well as detailed information on specific interactions. Here we suggest a physical model of protein interactions that can be used to extract additional information at an intermediate level: It enables us to identify proteins which share biological interaction motifs, and also to identify potentially missing or spurious interactions. Results: Our new graph model explains observed interactions between proteins by an underlying interaction of complementary binding domains (lock-and-key model). This leads to a novel graph-theoretical algorithm to identify bipartite subgraphs within protein-protein interaction networks. By testing on synthetic data, we demonstrate that under certain modelling assumptions, the algorithm will return correct domain information a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: BIOINFORMATICS
• Authors: Julie L. Morrison, Rainer Breitling, Desmond J. Higham, David R. Gilbert
• Keywords: BIOINFORMATICS 2006, Bioinformatics Research Centre, Glasgow, Protein-protein Interaction Networks