Mining Proteins Associated with Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma in Complex Networks

The purpose of this study was to construct a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network related to oralsquamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Each protein was ranked and those most associated with OSCC were minedwithin the network. First, OSCC-related genes were retrieved from the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man(OMIM) database. Then they were mapped to their protein identifiers and a seed set of proteins was built. Theseed proteins were expanded using the nearest neighbor expansion method to construct a PPI network throughthe Online Predicated Human Interaction Database (OPHID). The network was verified to be statisticallysignificant, the score of each protein was evaluated by algorithm, then the OSCC-related proteins were ranked.38 OSCC related seed proteins were expanded to 750 protein pairs. A protein-protein interaction nerwork wasthen constructed and the 30 top-ranked proteins listed. The four highest-scoring seed proteins were SMAD4,CTNNB1, HRAS, NOTCH1, and four non-seed proteins P53, EP300, SMAD3, SRC were mined using the nearestneighbor expansion method. The methods shown here may facilitate the discovery of important OSCC proteinsand guide medical researchers in further pertinent studies.