Complementarity of network and sequence information in homologous proteins

Abstract

Traditional approaches for homology detection rely on finding sufficient similarities between protein sequences. Motivated by studies demonstrating that from non-sequence based sources of biological information, such as the secondary or tertiary molecular structure, we can extract certain types of biological knowledge when sequence-based approaches fail, we hypothesize that protein-protein interaction (PPI) network topology and protein sequence might give insights into different slices of biological information. Since proteins aggregate to perform a function instead of acting in isolation, analyzing complex wirings around a protein in a PPI network could give deeper insights into the protein’s role in the inner working of the cell than analyzing sequences of individual genes. Hence, we believe that one could lose much information by focusing on sequence information alone.