Mining Host-Pathogen Protein Interactions to Characterize Burkholderia mallei Infectivity Mechanisms
Table 3
Topological properties of human proteins interacting with B. mallei.
We evaluated the following properties of the host proteins that interacted with B. mallei proteins based on the human protein-protein interaction (PPI) network [25]: the number of these host proteins in the human PPI network (Np); the average number of interacting partners (in the human PPI network) of each host protein (D); the clustering coefficient, i.e., the number of interactions among the nearest neighbors (C); the average shortest path between any two proteins in the set (SP); the average number of interacting partners in the human PPI network where both partners interact with B. mallei proteins (Di); and the number of host proteins in the largest connected component ( ). The top three rows show the results for the host proteins present in the PPI that interacted with the nine known virulence factors, whereas the three lower rows correspond to host proteins that interacted with all 21 tested B. mallei proteins from the yeast two-hybrid screening (known and putative virulence factors). The results for the randomly selected (498 or 619) human proteins from the entire human PPI network (All PPIs) were generated through 103 random repetitions to create averages and standard deviations. The indicated p-values correspond to the probability of the observed properties being different from the randomly selected set from all PPIs.