AligNet: Alignment of Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

One of the most difficult problems in systems biology is to discover protein-protein interactions as well as their associated functions. The analysis and alignment of protein-protein interaction networks (PPIN), which are the standard model to describe protein-protein interactions, has become a key ingredient to obtain functional orthologs as well as evolutionary conserved pathways and protein complexes. Several methods have been proposed to solve the PPIN alignment problem, aimed to match conserved subnetworks or functionally related proteins. However, the right balance between considering network topology and biological information is one of the most difficult and key points in any PPIN alignment algorithm which, unfortunately, remains unsolved. Therefore, in this work, we propose AligNet, a new method and software tool for the pairwise global alignment of PPIN that produces biologically meaningful alignments and more efficient computations than state-of-the-art methods and tools, by achieving a good balance between structural matching and protein function conservation as well as reasonable running times.