Fig. 4

The consensus meta-interactome improves functional predictions. a Predicting the functions of sampled OGs we observed that the addition of the consensus meta-interactome allowed for better functional prediction (P < 10^-50, Student’s t-test). Connecting functionally annotated orthologous groups (OG) if they harbored interacting proteins of E. coli we randomly sampled 20% of all OGs 1000 times and utilized the remainder to predict the functions of the sampled OGs. As a measure of the prediction quality we calculated the area under the ROC curve. In comparison, we augmented the underlying E. coli specific network of OGs with remaining links in the underlying consensus meta-interactome. b We obtained similar results when we considered OGs that were initially connected by interactions between proteins of C. jejuni. In the inset of (c) we calculated the fraction of correctly predicted functions of OGs as a function of the degree in the underlying OG networks of E. coli and C. jejuni, suggesting that increased number of links corresponds to elevated levels of prediction accuracy. Assessing the impact of the consensus meta-interactome on the accuracy of predicted functions of OGs, we observed that the functional prediction for OGs with low degree was improved