Assessing protein-protein interactions based on the semantic similarity of interacting proteins

The Gene Ontology (GO) has been used in estimating the semantic similarity of proteins since it has the largest and reliable vocabulary of gene products and characteristics. We developed a new method which can assess Protein-Protein Interactions (PPI) using the branching factor and information content of the common ancestor of interacting proteins in the GO hierarchy. We performed a comparative evaluation of the measure with other GO-based similarity measures and evaluation results showed that our method outperformed others in most GO domains.