RESEARCH ARTICLE Rechecking the Centrality-Lethality Rule in the Scope of Protein Subcellular Localization Interaction Networks

Essential proteins are indispensable for living organisms to maintain life activities and play important roles in the studies of pathology, synthetic biology, and drug design. Therefore, besides experiment methods, many computational methods are proposed to identify essen-tial proteins. Based on the centrality-lethality rule, various centrality methods are employed to predict essential proteins in a Protein-protein Interaction Network (PIN). However, neglecting the temporal and spatial features of protein-protein interactions, the centrality scores calculated by centrality methods are not effective enough for measuring the essenti-ality of proteins in a PIN. Moreover, many methods, which overfit with the features of essen-tial proteins for one species, may perform poor for other species. In this paper, we demonstrate that the centrality-lethality rule also exists in Protein Subcellular Localization Interaction Networks (PSLINs). To do this, a method based on Localization Specificity for Essential protein Detection (LSED), was proposed, which can be combined with any cen-trality method for calculating the improved centrality scores by taking into consideration PSLINs in which proteins play their roles. In this study, LSED was combined with eight cen