Identification of Essential Proteins by Detecting Topological and Functional Clusters in Protein Interaction Network of Saccharomyces Cerevisiae

2. Background

Though many experimental methods, namely, RNA interference (Cullen & Arndt, 2005; Kamath et al., 2003), conditional knockout (Giaever et al., 2002) etc. are reliable to detect essential proteins but they become less promising due to time and cost metric. With the introduction of high throughput techniques such as mass spectrometry, tandem affinity purification (Ho et al., 2002), a deluge of Protein Interaction data is available whose functional characterization is required in large scale. This fact necessitates the computational techniques to predict the function of unknown protein, insight of essential proteins and their interaction pattern which are helpful to discover drug targets.

Form the recent studies it is observed that computational techniques use sequence-based features or topological features or combination of these heterogeneous features to detect essential proteins.