Alignment of Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

Abstract

PPI network alignment aims to find topological and functional similarities between networks of different species. Several alignment approaches have been proposed. Each of these approaches relies on a different alignment method and uses different biological information during the alignment process such as the topological structure of the networks and the sequence similarities between the proteins, but less of them integrate the functional similarities between proteins. In this context, we present our algorithm PPINA (Protein-Protein Interaction Network Aligner), which is an extension of the NETAL algorithm. The latter aligns two networks based on the sequence, functional and network topology similarity of the proteins. PPINA has been tested on real PPI networks. The results show that PPINA has outperformed other alignment algorithms where it provides biologically meaningful results.