Shortest path-based identification of essential proteins
Wenping Zheng · Journal of Guangxi University · 2011
Identification of essential protein contributes to understanding the living processes at the system level.The essential protein identification based on protein interaction network topology characteristics can improve the accuracy and speed of recognition effectively.The number of shortest paths which pass a protein node and the vertex betweenness can be used to measure the node centrality degree.However,the computing speed and the calculation scale are limited.According to the characteristics of a protein network,the shortest path-based method of essential protein identification is presented.The method chooses reasonable identification thresholds and topology parameters to predict essential proteins of the whole protein-protein interaction network.Experiment results show that the proposed identification method can describe the importance of protein nodes effectively.The method can be used to identify the essential protein with good connectivity and big edge density of the whole protein-protein interaction network,without affecting the accuracy.