Figure 1

Calculating the Cancer Linker Degree (CLD) of a protein. The Cancer Linker Degree (CLD) of a protein is defined as the absolute number of partners of the protein that are known to be involved in cancer. The procedure followed to calculate the CLD of a protein consists of 3 steps: 1) setting the known cancer genes as seeds; 2) retrieving the direct interaction partners for the known cancer genes; and 3) calculating the CLD of each protein (i.e. the number of known cancer genes to which it is connected). In the example provided, we observe that proteins with high CLD are more likely to be cancer gene products that proteins with low CLD.