Determination of Signaling Pathways in Proteins through Network Theory: Importance of the Topology

Network theory methods are being increasingly applied to proteins to investigate complex biological phenomena. Residues that are important for signaling processes can be identified by their condition as critical nodes in a protein structure network. This analysis involves modeling the protein as a graph in which each residue is represented as a node and edges are drawn between nodes that are deemed connected. In this paper, we show that the results obtained from this type of network analysis (i.e., signaling pathways, key residues for signal transmission, etc.) are profoundly affected by the topology of the network, with normally used determination of network edges by geometrical cutoff schemes giving rise to substantial statistical errors. We propose a method of determining protein structure networks by calculating inter-residue interaction energies and show that it gives an accurate and reliable description of the signal-propagation properties of a known allosteric enzyme. We also show that including covalent interactions in the network topology is essential for accurate results to be obtained.