Exploring virus relationships based on virus-host protein-protein interaction network.
BACKGROUND
Currently, several systems have been proposed to classify viruses and indicate the relationships between different ones, though each system has its limitations because of the complexity of viral origins and their rapid evolution rate. We hereby propose a new method to explore the relationships between different viruses.


METHODS
A new method, which is based on the virus-host protein-protein interaction network, is proposed in this paper to categorize viruses. The distances between 114 human viruses, including 48 HIV-1 and HIV-2 viruses, are estimated according to the protein-protein interaction network between these viruses and humans.


CONCLUSIONS
The results demonstrated that our method can disclose not only relationships consistent with the taxonomic results of currently used systems of classification but also the potential relationships that the current virus classification systems have not revealed. Moreover, the method points to a new direction where the functional relationships between viruses and hosts can be used to explore the virus relationships on a systematic level.
The Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Institute of Biomedical Sciences, School of Life Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, China.
Feng
F
Xu
Chen
C
Zhao
Yuhua
Y
Li
Jiang
J
Li
Youping
Y
Deng
Tieliu
T
Shi
D015497:HIV-1 / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology; D015498:HIV-2 / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology; D054884:Host-Pathogen Interactions; D006801:Humans; D025941:Protein Interaction Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D014764:Viral Proteins / Q000378:metabolism*; D018406:Virus Physiological Phenomena; D014780:Viruses / Q000378:metabolism*
D014764:Viral Proteins