The Analysis of the Druggable Families Based on Topological Features in the Protein-Protein Interaction Network

Drug target proteins (DTPs) are mainly distributed in several druggable families. Although proteins in one druggable family are similar in sequence and structure, not all of them are DTPs. However, the difference between DTPs and potential target proteins (PTPs) is not yet clear. We explored the topological difference between DTPs and PTPs in the human protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. Hence we found DTPs exhibited patterns of topological similarity in the human PPI network. Moreover, we hypothesize that DTPs perturb the network in a controlled manner because their influences on the PPI network were greater than PTPs' but less than hubs'. At last, we applied the similarity of topological features to prioritize PTPs in two largest families. These results demonstrated the potential application of topological features, which could be helpful to find new DTP candidates.