Research Article Pin-Align: A New Dynamic Programming Approach to Align Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

Copyright © 2014 Farid Amir-Ghiasvand et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To date, few tools for aligning protein-protein interaction networks have been suggested. These tools typically find conserved interaction patterns using various local or global alignment algorithms. However, the improvement of the speed, scalability, simplification, and accuracy of network alignment tools is still the target of new researches. In this paper, we introduce Pin-Align, a new tool for local alignment of protein-protein interaction networks. Pin-Align accuracy is tested on protein interaction networks from IntAct, DIP, and the Stanford Network Database and the results are compared with other well-known algorithms. It is shown that Pin-Align has higher sensitivity and specificity in terms of KEGG Ortholog groups. 1