The centrality of cancer proteins in human protein-protein interaction network: a revisit

Topological analysis of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks has been widely applied to the investigation on cancer mechanisms. However, there is still a debate on whether cancer proteins exhibit more topological centrality compared to the other proteins in the human PPI network. To resolve this debate, we first identified four sets of human proteins, and then mapped these proteins into the yeast PPI network by homologous genes. Finally, we compared these proteins' properties in human and yeast PPI networks. Experiments over two real datasets demonstrated that cancer proteins tend to have higher degree and smaller clustering coefficient than non-cancer proteins. Experimental results also validated that cancer proteins have larger betweenness centrality compared to the other proteins on the STRING dataset. However, on the BioGRID dataset, the average betweenness centrality of cancer proteins is larger than that of disease and control proteins, but smaller than that of essential proteins.