Protein Stability, Turnover Kinetics, and Abundance Constrain the Scaling of Protein Interaction Networks

The propensity of proteins to form oligomers is ultimately dictated by their structural configuration(s). Proteins that persist in a discrete conformational state may form a limited number of specific interactions while those that sample a broader structural ensemble may instead associate with a wider array of partners. These intrinsic tendencies potentially constrain the way proteins navigate wider interaction networks. In this work, we aggregated and surveyed a wide variety of biophysical, biochemical, and cellular descriptors of the S. cerevisiae proteome to identify biases in the connectivity of its protein-protein interaction network. Using mass spectrometry-based interactome measurements and various protein stability estimates, we find that a disproportionate number of abundant, yet unstable binding proteins act as network hubs. Moreover, we show that these features alone can be used to discriminate between hubs and non-hub proteins with high accuracy (AUROC = 0.898). Interestingly, we find that half-lives of hub proteins depend on whether or not they reside within static complexes and/ or whether they interact with molecular chaperones. Finally, we note that the observed connectivity biases associated with abundant, unstable proteins only pertain to network hubs, but not to the bottlenecks that connect them. Together, our findings reveal how the conformational stability of a protein may constrain its context within protein-protein interaction networks.