Comparison of the interactomic networks of different species in terms of accessibility

Abstract

Protein–protein interaction networks were investigated in terms of outward accessibility, which quantifies the effectiveness of each protein in accessing other proteins and is related to the internality of nodes. By comparing the accessibility between 144 orthologproteins in yeast and the fruit fly, we found that the accessibility tends to be higher among proteins in the fly than in yeast. In addition, z-scores of the accessibility calculated for different species revealed that the protein networks of less evolved species tend to be more random than those of more evolved species. The accessibility was also used to identify the border of the yeast protein interaction network, which was found to be mainly composed of viable proteins.