A hypergraph model for the yeast protein complex network

We consider a hypergraph model for the protein complex network obtained from a large-scale experimental study to characterize the proteome of the yeast. Our model views the yeast proteome as a hypergraph, with the proteins corresponding to vertices and the complexes corresponding to hyperedges. Previous work has modeled the protein complex data as a protein-protein interaction graph or as a complex intersection graph; both models lose information and require more space. Our results show that the yeast protein complex hyper-graph is a small-world and power-law hypergraph. We design an algorithm for computing the k-core of a hypergraph, and use it to identify the core proteome, the maximum core of the protein complex hypergraph. We show that the core proteome of the yeast is enriched in essential and homologous proteins. We implement greedy approximation algorithms for variant minimum weight vertex covers of a hypergraph; these algorithms can be used to improve the reliability and efficiency of the experimental method that identifies the protein complex networks.