The analysis of the drug–targets based on the topological properties in the human protein–protein interaction network

Abstract

Analyzing topological properties of drug-target proteins in the biology network is very helpful in understanding the mechanism of drug action. However, comprehensive studies to elaborately characterize the biological network features of drug-target proteins are still lacking. In this paper, we compared the topological properties of drug–targets with those of the non–drug-target sets, by mapping the drug–targets in DrugBank to the human protein interaction network. The results indicate that the topological properties of drug-targets are significantly distinguishable from those of non–drug-targets. Moreover, the potential possibility of drug-target prediction based on these properties is discussed. All proteins in the interaction network were ranked by their topological properties. Among the top 200 proteins, 94 overlapped with drug-targets in DrugBank and some novel predictions were found to be drug–targets in public literatures and other databases. In conclusion, our method explores the topological properties of drug-targets in the human protein interaction network by exploiting the large–scale drug-targets and protein interaction data.

Keywords::

• Drug-target
• protein–protein interaction
• bioinformatics
• topological property

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 30370798, 30571034, and 30570424), The National High Tech Development Project of China, the 863 Program (Grant No. 2007AA02Z329), The National Basic Research Program of China, the 973 Program (Grant No. 2008CB517302), National Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (Grant Nos. ZJG0501, 1055HG009, GB03C602-4, and BMFH060044), and the Science Technology development project of Beijing Municipal Commission of Education (KM200610025011) and New Century Hundred-Thousand-Ten Thousand Talents Project of Beijing City, 2006. The authors wish to thank Hui Yu for her suggestions on the paper.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.