Detection of Gene Orthology Based on Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

Ortholog detection methods present a powerful approach for finding genes that participate in similar biological processes across different organisms, extending our understanding of interactions between genes across different pathways, and understanding the evolution of gene families. We exploit features derived from the alignment of protein-protein interaction networks to reconstruct KEGG orthologs for Drosophila melanogaster, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Mus musculus and Homo sapiens protein-protein interaction networks extracted from the DIP repository for protein-protein interaction data using the decision tree, naive-Bayes and support vector machine classification algorithms. The performance of our classifiers in reconstructing KEGG orthologs is compared against a basic reciprocal BLAST hit approach. We provide implementations of the resulting algorithms as part of BiNA, an open source biomolecular network alignment toolkit.