Building Bridges Between Structural and Network-Based Systems Biology

Abstract

The integration of structural and network-based systems biology is paramount for the improved understanding of how the proteins interact to modulate the behavior of complex biological systems. This review presents the current literature on the computational studies that combine these two scientific fields focusing on two main approaches: network-based analysis of the structure and dynamics of proteins and the in silico reconstruction of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks or expansion of existed protein interactomes driven by structural annotations. Last, to enrich the current knowledge of the topological properties of the protein structure networks and evaluate the capacity of the public structural annotations of protein domains to predict novel PPIs, further computational analyses, missing so far from the literature, were performed.

Keywords: Functional dynamics; PPI network; Pfam domains; Structural biology; Systems biology.