IsoRankN: spectral methods for global alignment of multiple protein networks

Motivation: With the increasing availability of large protein–protein interaction networks, the question of protein network alignment is becoming central to systems biology. Network alignment is further delineated into two sub-problems: local alignment, to find small conserved motifs across networks...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liao, Chung-Shou, Lu, Kanghao, Baym, Michael Hartmann, Singh, Rohit
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Oxford University Press 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/70980
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1303-5598
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2724-7228
Description
Summary:Motivation: With the increasing availability of large protein–protein interaction networks, the question of protein network alignment is becoming central to systems biology. Network alignment is further delineated into two sub-problems: local alignment, to find small conserved motifs across networks, and global alignment, which attempts to find a best mapping between all nodes of the two networks. In this article, our aim is to improve upon existing global alignment results. Better network alignment will enable, among other things, more accurate identification of functional orthologs across species. Results: We introduce IsoRankN (IsoRank-Nibble) a global multiple-network alignment tool based on spectral clustering on the induced graph of pairwise alignment scores. IsoRankN outperforms existing algorithms for global network alignment in coverage and consistency on multiple alignments of the five available eukaryotic networks. Being based on spectral methods, IsoRankN is both error tolerant and computationally efficient.