UC San Diego

Detection of community structure has become a fundamental step in the analysis of biological networks with application to protein function annotation, disease gene prediction, and drug discovery. This recent impact creates a need to make these techniques and their accompanying visualization schemes available to a broad range of biologists. Here we present a service-oriented, end-to-end software framework, CDAPS (Community Detection APplication and Service), that integrates the identification, annotation, visualization, and interrogation of multiscale network communities, accessible within the popular Cytoscape network analysis platform. With novel design principles, CDAPS addresses unmet new challenges, such as identifying hierarchical community structures, comparison of outputs generated from diverse network resources, and easy deployment of new algorithms, to facilitate community-sourced science. We demonstrate that the CDAPS framework can be applied to high-throughput protein-protein interaction networks to gain novel insights, such as the identification of putative new members of known protein complexes.