Moonlighting proteins are a subclass of multifunctional proteins whose functions are unrelated. Although they may play important roles in cells, there has been no large-scale method to identify them, nor any effort to characterize them as a group. Here, we propose the first method for the identification of ‘extreme multifunctional' proteins from an interactome as a first step to characterize moonlighting proteins. By combining network topological information with protein annotations, we identify 430 extreme multifunctional proteins (3% of the human interactome). We show that the candidates form a distinct sub-group of proteins, characterized by specific features, which form a signature of extreme multifunctionality. Overall, extreme multifunctional proteins are enriched in linear motifs and less intrinsically disordered than network hubs. We also provide MoonDB, a database containing information on all the candidates identified in the analysis and a set of manually curated human moonlighting proteins.

Motivation: Multifunctional proteins perform several functions. They are expected to interact specifically with distinct sets of partners, simultaneously or not, depending on the function performed. Current graph clustering methods usually allow a protein to belong to only one cluster, therefore impeding a realistic assignment of multifunctional proteins to clusters.Results: Here, we present Overlapping Cluster Generator (OCG), a novel clustering method which decomposes a network into overlapping clusters and which is, therefore, capable of correct assignment of multifunctional proteins. The principle of OCG is to cover the graph with initial overlapping classes that are iteratively fused into a hierarchy according to an extension of Newman's modularity function. By applying OCG to a human protein–protein interaction network, we show that multifunctional proteins are revealed at the intersection of clusters and demonstrate that the method outperforms other existing methods on simulated graphs and PPI networks.Availability: This software can be downloaded from http://tagc.univ-mrs.fr/welcome/spip.php?rubrique197Contact: brun@tagc.univ-mrs.frSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.