Protein-Protein Interaction Network Evaluation for Identifying Potential Drug Targets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As pathogens evolve effective schemes to overcome the effect of antibiotics, the prevalent "one drug and one drug target" approach is falling behind. We propose novel strategies for identifying potential multiple-drug targets in pathogenic protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks with the goal of disrupting known pathways/complexes. Given a set S of pathogenic pathways/complexes, we first consider computing the minimum number of proteins (with no human orthologs) whose removal from the PPI network disrupts all pathways/complexes. Unfortunately, even the best approximation algorithms for this (NP-hard) problem return too many targets to be practical. Thus, we focus on computing the optimal tradeoff (i.e., maximum ratio) between the number of disrupted essential pathways/complexes and the protein targets. For this "sparsest cut" problem, we describe two polynomial time algorithms with respective approximation factors of |S| and O(√ n) (n: number of nodes). On the Escherichia coli PPI network with nine essential (signaling) paths from the KEGG database, our algorithms show how to disrupt three of them by targeting only three proteins (two of them essential proteins). We also consider the case where there are no available essential pathways/complexes to guide us. In order to maximize the number of disrupted "potential" pathways/complexes, we show how to compute the smallest set of proteins whose removal partitions the PPI network into two almost-equal sized subnetworks so as to maximize the number of potential pathways/complexes disrupted. This approach yields 28 potential targets (four of them known drug targets) on the E. coli PPI network whose removal partitions it to two subnetworks with relative sizes of 1-5.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".