Inter k-shell connectivity: a novel computational approach to identify drug targets

Central lethality rule suggests that hub proteins are the most important and their deletion leads to more damage to biological networks as compared to non-hub proteins. Hub proteins present towards the core of protein-protein interaction (PPI) network are considered to be more important in comparison to proteins at the periphery. The k-shell decomposition method generates k-shell index which indicates the local and global importance of a protein in PPI network. But there is no method till now reported which can differentiate among the proteins with same k-shell index. In this work attempt has been made to add parameter Inter k-shell connectivity to differentiate proteins with same k-shell index and exploring their biological importance.