Sequence comparison and alignment has had an enormous impact on our understanding of evolution, biology and disease. Comparison and alignment of biological networks will probably have a similar impact. Existing network alignments use information external to the networks, such as sequence, because no good algorithm for purely topological alignment has yet been devised. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm based solely on network topology, that can be used to align any two networks. We apply it to biological networks to produce by far the most complete topological alignments of biological networks to date. We demonstrate that both species phylogeny and detailed biological function of individual proteins can be extracted from our alignments. Topology-based alignments have the potential to provide a completely new, independent source of phylogenetic information. Our alignment of the protein -protein interaction networks of two very different species-yeast and human-indicate that even distant species share a surprising amount of network topology, suggesting broad similarities in internal cellular wiring across all life on Earth.

Sequence comparison and alignment has had an enormous impact on our understanding of evolution, biology, and disease. Comparison and alignment of biological networks will likely have a similar impact. Existing network alignments use information external to the networks, such as sequence, because no good algorithm for purely topological alignment has yet been devised. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm based solely on network topology, that can be used to align any two networks. We apply it to biological networks to produce by far the most complete topological alignments of biological networks to date. We demonstrate that both species phylogeny and detailed biological function of individual proteins can be extracted from our alignments. Topology-based alignments have the potential to provide a completely new, independent source of phylogenetic information. Our alignment of the protein-protein interaction networks of two very different species-yeast and human-indicate that even distant species share a surprising amount of network topology with each other, suggesting broad similarities in internal cellular wiring across all life on Earth.

Many real-world phenomena have been described in terms of large networks. Networks have been invaluable models for the understanding of biological systems. Since proteins carry out most biological processes, we focus on analysing protein -protein interaction (PPI) networks. Proteins interact to perform a function. Thus, PPI networks reflect the interconnected nature of biological processes and analysing their structural properties could provide insights into biological function and disease. We have already demonstrated, by using a sensitive graph theoretic method for comparing topologies of node neighbourhoods called 'graphlet degree signatures', that proteins with similar surroundings in PPI networks tend to perform the same functions. Here, we explore whether the involvement of genes in cancer suggests the similarity of their topological 'signatures' as well. By applying a series of clustering methods to proteins' topological signature similarities, we demonstrate that the obtained clusters are significantly enriched with cancer genes. We apply this methodology to identify novel cancer gene candidates, validating 80 per cent of our predictions in the literature. We also validate predictions biologically by identifying cancer-related negative regulators of melanogenesis identified in our siRNA screen. This is encouraging, since we have done this solely from PPI network topology. We provide clear evidence that PPI network structure around cancer genes is different from the structure around non-cancer genes. Understanding the underlying principles of this phenomenon is an open question, with a potential for increasing our understanding of complex diseases.

Proteins are essential macromolecules of life that carry out most cellular processes. Since proteins aggregate to perform function, and since protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks model these aggregations, one would expect to uncover new biology from PPI network topology. Hence, using PPI networks to predict protein function and role of protein pathways in disease has received attention. A debate remains open about whether network properties of “biologically central (BC)” genes (i.e., their protein products), such as those involved in aging, cancer, infectious diseases, or signaling and drug-targeted pathways, exhibit some topological centrality compared to the rest of the proteins in the human PPI network.To help resolve this debate, we design new network-based approaches and apply them to get new insight into biological function and disease. We hypothesize that BC genes have a topologically central (TC) role in the human PPI network. We propose two different concepts of topological centrality. We design a new centrality measure to capture complex wirings of proteins in the network that identifies as TC those proteins that reside in dense extended network neighborhoods. Also, we use the notion of domination and find dominating sets (DSs) in the PPI network, i.e., sets of proteins such that every protein is either in the DS or is a neighbor of the DS. Clearly, a DS has a TC role, as it enables efficient communication between different network parts.We find statistically significant enrichment in BC genes of TC nodes and outperform the existing methods indicating that genes involved in key biological processes occupy topologically complex and dense regions of the network and correspond to its “spine” that connects all other network parts and can thus pass cellular signals efficiently throughout the network. To our knowledge, this is the first study that explores domination in the context of PPI networks.

Burkholderia mallei is an infectious intracellular pathogen whose virulence and resistance to antibiotics makes it a potential bioterrorism agent. Given its genetic origin as a commensal soil organism, it is equipped with an extensive and varied set of adapted mechanisms to cope with and modulate host-cell environments. One essential virulence mechanism constitutes the specialized secretion systems that are designed to penetrate host-cell membranes and insert pathogen proteins directly into the host cell's cytosol. However, the secretion systems' proteins and, in particular, their host targets are largely uncharacterized. Here, we used a combined in silico, in vitro, and in vivo approach to identify B. mallei proteins required for pathogenicity. We used bioinformatics tools, including orthology detection and ab initio predictions of secretion system proteins, as well as published experimental Burkholderia data to initially select a small number of proteins as putative virulence factors. We then used yeast two-hybrid assays against normalized whole human and whole murine proteome libraries to detect and identify interactions among each of these bacterial proteins and host proteins. Analysis of such interactions provided both verification of known virulence factors and identification of three new putative virulence proteins. We successfully created insertion mutants for each of these three proteins using the virulent B. mallei ATCC 23344 strain. We exposed BALB/c mice to mutant strains and the wild-type strain in an aerosol challenge model using lethal B. mallei doses. In each set of experiments, mice exposed to mutant strains survived for the 21-day duration of the experiment, whereas mice exposed to the wild-type strain rapidly died. Given their in vivo role in pathogenicity, and based on the yeast two-hybrid interaction data, these results point to the importance of these pathogen proteins in modulating host ubiquitination pathways, phagosomal escape, and actin-cytoskeleton rearrangement processes.

Networks are an invaluable framework for modeling biological systems. Analyzing protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks can provide insight into underlying cellular processes. It is expected that comparison and alignment of biological networks will have a similar impact on our understanding of evolution, biological function, and disease as did sequence comparison and alignment. Here, we introduce a novel pairwise global alignment algorithm called Common-neighbors based GRAph ALigner (C-GRAAL) that uses heuristics for maximizing the number of aligned edges between two networks and is based solely on network topology. As such, it can be applied to any type of network, such as social, transportation, or electrical networks. We apply C-GRAAL to align PPI networks of eukaryotic and prokaryotic species, as well as inter-species PPI networks, and we demonstrate that the resulting alignments expose large connected and functionally topologically aligned regions. We use the resulting alignments to transfer biological knowledge across species, successfully validating many of the predictions. Moreover, we show that C-GRAAL can be used to align human-pathogen inter-species PPI networks and that it can identify patterns of pathogen interactions with host proteins solely from network topology.

BackgroundRNA-mediated interference (RNAi)-based functional genomics is a systems-level approach to identify novel genes that control biological phenotypes. Existing computational approaches can identify individual genes from RNAi datasets that regulate a given biological process. However, currently available methods cannot identify which RNAi screen "hits" are novel components of well-characterized biological pathways known to regulate the interrogated phenotype. In this study, we describe a method to identify genes from RNAi datasets that are novel components of known biological pathways. We experimentally validate our approach in the context of a recently completed RNAi screen to identify novel regulators of melanogenesis.ResultsIn this study, we utilize a PPI network topology-based approach to identify targets within our RNAi dataset that may be components of known melanogenesis regulatory pathways. Our computational approach identifies a set of screen targets that cluster topologically in a human PPI network with the known pigment regulator Endothelin receptor type B (EDNRB). Validation studies reveal that these genes impact pigment production and EDNRB signaling in pigmented melanoma cells (MNT-1) and normal melanocytes.ConclusionsWe present an approach that identifies novel components of well-characterized biological pathways from functional genomics datasets that could not have been identified by existing statistical and computational approaches.

SummaryTraditional 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. We examine whether the information about homologous proteins captured by PPI network topology differs and to what extent from the information captured by their sequences. We measure how similar the topology around homologous proteins in a PPI network is and show that such proteins have statistically significantly higher network similarity than nonhomologous proteins. We compare these network similarity trends of homologous proteins with the trends in their sequence identity and find that network similarities uncover almost as much homology as sequence identities. Although none of the two methods, network topology and sequence identity, seems to capture homology information in its entirety, we demonstrate that the two might give insights into somewhat different types of biological information, as the overlap of the homology information that they uncover is relatively low. Therefore, we conclude that similarities of proteins' topological neighborhoods in a PPI network could be used as a complementary method to sequence-based approaches for identifying homologs, as well as for analyzing evolutionary distance and functional divergence of homologous proteins.