Determining modular organization of protein interaction networks by maximizing modularity density.

Background: With ever increasing amount of available data on biological networks, modeling and understanding the structure of these large networks is an important problem with profound biological implications. Cellular functions and biochemical events are coordinately carried out by groups of proteins interacting each other in biological modules. Identifying of such modules in protein interaction networks is very important for understanding the structure and function of these fundamental cellular networks.

A hybrid graph-theoretic method for mining overlapping functional modules in large sparse protein interaction networks.

Modular architecture, which encompasses groups of genes/proteins involved in elementary biological functional units, is a basic form of the organisation of interacting proteins. Here, we propose a method that combines the Line Graph Transformation (LGT) and clique percolation-clustering algorithm to detect network modules, which may overlap each other in large sparse PPI networks. The resulting modules by the present method show a high coverage among yeast, fly, and worm PPI networks, respectively.