Inparablog

My very first article is out!

van Dam, T.J.P., Snel, B. (2008). Protein Complex Evolution Does Not Involve Extensive Network Rewiring. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(7), e1000132. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000132

This is the author summary:

Protein complexes are a pivotal part of the functioning of cells in health and disease. Studying the evolution of these essential cellular features is of great intrinsic as well as practical interest. However, the study of the evolution of protein complexes by comparative analysis is fraught with difficulties. Hence current reports that reveal low overlap in the interactome between species are often reluctant to equate this low level of overlap to a low level of conservation. Here we exploit new public data sets, which display unparalleled coverage, to study the amount of co-complex membership conservation, and we present a novel measure for the absence of interactions. We thereby observe a hitherto unreported high level of conservation of 90% of the interactions when the presence of the genes coding for the protein pairs that participate in the same protein complex is also conserved. This allows for new insights into the evolution of protein complexes: the evolutionary dynamics of protein complexes are, by and large, not the result of network rewiring (i.e. acquisition or loss of co-complex memberships), but mainly due to genomic acquisition or loss of genes coding for subunits.