IMPRECO: Distributed prediction of protein complexes

Proteins interact among themselves, and different interactions form a very huge number of possible combinations representable as protein-to-protein interaction (PPI) networks that are mapped into graph structures. Protein complexes are a subset of mutually interacting proteins. Starting from a PPI network, protein complexes may be extracted by using computational methods. The paper proposes a new complexes meta-predictor which is capable of predicting protein complexes by integrating the results of different predictors. It is based on a distributed architecture that wraps predictor as web/grid services that is built on top of the grid infrastructure. The proposed meta-predictor first invokes different available predictors wrapped as services in a parallel way, then integrates their results using graph analysis, and finally evaluates the predicted results by comparing them against external databases storing experimentally determined protein complexes. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.