Figure 2.

Functional characteristics of pathway controlling proteins. (a) We collected 20 proteins that controlled the highest number of pathways. We observed that such proteins were mostly essential and had kinase but rarely transcription factor functions. While sporadically membrane-bound receptors, the majority of such proteins were involved in signaling activities. More quantitatively, we randomly sampled sets of control proteins and found that proteins that controlled an increasing number of pathways were enriched with (b) essential genes and (c) signaling functions, while they rarely were membrane-bound receptors. (d) Such proteins were more frequently enriched with kinases than transcription factors. (e) As for post-translational modifications, proteins that controlled an increasing number of pathways were strongly enriched with acetylated and methylated proteins while we only found a modest enrichment of phosphorylated proteins.