Understanding protein dispensability through machine-learning analysis of high-throughput data.

Motivation: Protein dispensability is fundamental to the understanding of gene function and evolution. Recent advances in generating high-throughput data such as genomic sequence data, protein-protein interaction data, gene-expression data and growth-rate data of mutants allow us to investigate protein dispensability systematically at the genome scale.

Results: In our studies, protein dispensability is represented as a fitness score that is measured by the growth rate of gene-deletion mutants.