Berlin 2008 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 28: Molecular Recognition

BP 28.6: Talk

Friday, February 29, 2008, 12:00–12:15, PC 203

Beyond modular structure in protein-interaction networks — Stefan Pinkert¹, •Jörg Reichardt², and Jörg Schultz¹ — ¹Dept. of Bioinformatics, University of Würzburg — ²Institute f. Theoretical Physics, University of Würzburg

The availability of large-scale databases on protein-protein interaction (PPI) has lead to a surge of research for structure in this data and biological information following from it. The paradigm of these approaches is that the inner workings of the cell are organized into relatively independent modules. Researchers have hence been trying to discover biological information in PPI networks by looking for densely connected groups of proteins, so-called modules or clusters, which are only sparsely connected to the rest of the network. In this contribution, we show that this search for cohesive clusters in PPI networks falls short of the rich structure present in these data and can only represent a small portion of the biological information present in these networks. We introduce an analysis method which is able to overcome these limitations and apply it to the Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD). We provide an insight into the large scale organization of the human protein interaction network and discuss possible biases in the network coming from the combination of yeast-2-hybrid, in vitro and in vivo experiments.