Assortativity of aging key players in the dynamical networks

Abstract

Human aging is the main social and medicinal challenge where it is one of the factors lead to disease. Understanding the process will be advantageous in the drugs and medicinal fields. In this study, we analyze the process through dynamic protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks by observing the topological changes of the network across ages. The dynamic networks consist of 14 ages, they are within 80 – 99 years, where we call aging-related protein networks. In each of the network, we analyzed the property of assortativity as proposed by recent study. Assortativity in PPI network is a measure to quantify the tendency of proteins to communicate with other similar proteins in the network. However, recent study proposes local assortativity for individual nodes in the network. Consequently, we are able to analyze the characteristics of aging network; i) Aging-related protein networks are disassortative with positive non-linear local assortativity, ii) there are strong and weak assortative key-players, iii) assortative key players are not close to all proteins in aging network, and iv) assortative hubs decrease the robustness of the networks.