Fig. 1.

The “simplest” disease – lethality – appears tied not to the protein itself, but rather to the molecular complex or module in which that protein participates, as for the examples of yeast protein complexes drawn in (a). Proteins are depicted as colored circles and experimentally detected memberships in the same protein complexes as connecting lines. (b) Across the complete set of yeast protein complexes, a systematic trend is apparent for members of the same complex to either be all essential, or all non-essential, with depletion for intermediate mixtures of essential and non-essential proteins. Figures are adapted from ref. [19].