A Hierarchical Clustering Strategy and Its Application to Proteomic Interaction Data

We describe a novel strategy of hierarchical clustering analysis, particularly useful to analyze proteomic interaction data. The logic behind this method is to use the information for all interactions among the elements of a set to evaluate the strength of the interaction of each pair of elements. Our procedure allows the characterization of protein complexes starting with partial data and the detection of "promiscuous" proteins that bias the results, generating false positive data. We demonstrate the usefulness of our strategy by analyzing a real case that involves 137 Saccharomyces cerevisiae proteins. Because most functional studies require the evaluation of similar data sets, our method has a wide range of applications and thus it can be established as a benchmark analysis for proteomic data.