Fig. 1

Schematic representation of the local network environment for a target protein. The target is shown as a rounded square and other proteins in the network are circles. A green outline encloses the local environment for the target node comprising N top neighbors ranked by their distance to the target node (N is set to 7 in this simple example). Numbers inside nodes correspond to ranks by the distance, while numbers along edges are the confidence values for biological interactions between individual proteins. Nodes in the local environment are colored according to their differential gene expression values (green – upregulated, red – downregulated) with the transparency level depending on the magnitude of up- and downregulation