Detecting core protein complexes based on link patterns

Protein complexes (or communities) exhibit specific topological structures in Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. As the central parts of the protein complexes, core protein complexes (also called seed communities) can represent functions of the protein complexes and reveal significant features of their topological structures. However, PPI networks are proved to be mixed and overlapped, and current methods have limitation in detecting the mixed structure. In this paper, a core protein complexes detection algorithm based on link patterns is proposed that can detect both clique structure and star structure. For validation, we detect core protein complexes in the real PPI networks, and results show our method can find both the clique structure and the star structure. A comparison with the state-of-the-art methods on the performance of Gene Ontology demonstrates that our method detects core protein complexes with higher similarity of the gene fragments.