Predicting protein functions by relaxation labelling protein interaction network

One of key issues in the post-genomic era is to assign functions to uncharacterized proteins. Since proteins seldom act alone; rather, they must interact with other biomolecular units to execute their functions. Thus, the functions of unknown proteins may be discovered through studying their interactions with proteins having known functions. Although many approaches have been developed for this purpose, one of main limitations in most of these methods is that the dependence among functional terms has not been taken into account.

We developed a new network-based protein function prediction method which combines the likelihood scores of local classifiers with a relaxation labelling technique. The framework can incorporate the inter-relationship among functional labels into the function prediction procedure and allow us to efficiently discover relevant non-local dependence. We evaluated the performance of the new method with one other representative network-based function prediction method using E. coli protein functional association networks.

Our results showed that the new method has better prediction performance than the previous method. The better predictive power of our method gives new insights about the importance of the dependence between functional terms in protein functional prediction.