Biological network border detection

Abstract

Complex networks have been widely used to model biological systems. The concept of accessibility has been proposed recently as a means to organize the nodes of complex networks as belonging to its border or center. Such an approach paves the way to investigating how the functional and structural properties of nodes vary with their respective position in the networks. In this work, we approach such a problem in a biological context applying border detection to Protein–Protein Interaction networks from four organisms of the Mycoplasma genus. We found evidence that the borderness of proteins bears a relation with their spatial organization and molecular function specificity.