Protein hubs in protein-protein interaction network are especially important due to their central roles in the entire network. Despite of their importance, the folding kinetics of hub proteins in comparison with non-hubs is still unknown. In this work, the folding rates for protein hubs and non-hubs were predicted and compared for the interactome of Escherichia coli K12, and the results showed that hub proteins fold faster than non-hub proteins. A possible explanation might be that protein hubs have more and fast-folding structural conformations than non-hubs, which leads to the notion of "hub of hubs" in the protein conformation space. It was found that the sequence and structure features relevant to protein folding rates are also different between hub and non-hub proteins. Moreover, the interacting proteins tend to have similar folding rates. These results gave insightful implications for understanding the interplay between the mechanisms of protein folding and interaction.
Keywords: Folding rate; Hub proteins; Protein folding and binding; Protein interaction network.