Revisiting date and party hubs: novel approaches to role assignment in protein interaction networks.

ABSTRACT: The idea of "date" and "party" hubs has been influential in the study of protein-protein interaction networks. Date hubs display low co-expression with their partners, whilst party hubs have high co-expression. It was proposed that party hubs are local coordinators whereas date hubs are global connectors. Here, we show that the reported importance of date hubs to network connectivity can in fact be attributed to a tiny subset of them. Crucially, these few, extremely central, hubs do not display particularly low expression correlation, undermining the idea of a link between this quantity and hub function. The date/party distinction was originally motivated by an approximately bimodal distribution of hub co-expression; we show that this feature is not always robust to methodological changes.

SUBMITTER: Agarwal S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2887459 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature