Structural properties of hub proteins

Abstract

Protein-protein interaction networks are scale free networks with a few hub proteins that have many interaction partners in the network. In this work, we examined the flexibility of the hubs by using a structural perspective and compared date hubs, which bind their partners at different times, and party hubs, which bind their partners simultaneously, with non hub proteins. The flexibility of the proteins is evaluated using temperature factors. Party hubs are found to be more flexible than date hubs, which in turn are more flexible than non-hub proteins. These may explain how a hub interacts with its partners specifically.