Protein protein interactions, evolutionary rate, abundance and age

Background: Does a relationship exist between a protein's evolutionary rate and its number of interactions? This relationship has been put forward many times, based on a biological premise that a highly interacting protein will be more restricted in its sequence changes. However, to date several studies have voiced conflicting views on the presence or absence of such a relationship. Results: Here we perform a large scale study over multiple data sets in order to demonstrate that the major reason for conflict between previous studies is the use of different but overlapping datasets. We show that lack of correlation, between evolutionary rate and number of interactions in a data set is related to the error rate. We also demonstrate that the correlation is not an artifact of the underlying distributions of evolutionary distance and interactions and is therefore likely to be biologically relevant. Further to this, we consider the claim that the dependence is due to gene expression le...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Ramazan Saeed, Charlotte M. Deane
• Keywords: BMCBI 2006, Evolutionary Rate, Large Scale Study, Proteins