Redundancies in Large-scale Protein Interaction Networks

Abstract

Understanding functional associations among genes discovered in sequencing projects is a key issue in post-genomic biology. However, reliable interpretation of the protein interaction data has been difficult. In this work, we show that if two proteins share significantly larger number of common interaction partners than random, they have close functional associations. Analysis of publicly available data from Saccharomyces cerevisiae reveals more than 2800 reliable functional associations, 29% of which involve at least one unannotated protein. By further analyzing these associations, we derive tentative functions for 81 unannotated proteins with high certainty.