Correlation of genomic features with dynamic modularity in the yeast interactome: a view from the structural perspective

The idea of the existence of date and party hubs in protein-protein interaction networks has been debated since it was proposed in 2004. Based on the incorporation of the information extracted from known three-dimensional structures of protein interactions, we revisited the properties associated with date and party hubs previously identified. The correlation of genomic essentiality, gene coexpression, and functional semantic similarity with date and party hubs were examined. The number of interaction interfaces associated with each hub was taken into account. The results suggested that the identification of date and party hubs based on their network connectivity and expression profiles with interaction partners may be incomplete. The number of interaction interfaces could play an important role in examining functional and topological properties associated with each hub protein. The observation is robust to the choice of degree cutoffs for hubs. Furthermore, we found that while singlish-interface hubs seem to correspond mostly to date hub, it appears that there is no significant difference between the proportions of multi-interface proteins categorized as date and as party hubs.