myMCL: A Web Portal for Protein Complexes Prediction

Abstract

Interactomics is the study of the Interactome, i.e. the whole set of macromolecular interactions within a cell. Proteins interact among them and different interactions are represented as graphs named Protein to Protein Interaction (PPI) networks. The interest in analyzing PPI networks is related to the possibility of predicting PPI properties on the basis of global properties of the graph (e.g. verify if homology among species involves PPI similarity), or to find set of protein interactions that has a biological meaning. The prediction of protein complexes has been faced in the last years by using different clustering algorithms. The Markov Clustering algorithm (MCL) is a method that presents one of the best performance but is currently available only as a stand alone application with a simple command-line interface available only on Linux platforms. Following a trend in bioinformatics, we provide a web portal (myMCL) allowing remote users to access MCL functions through the Internet. myMCL enables user to submit a job and stores results in a local database for further processing.