Parkinson's disease and lactoferrin: Analysis of dependent protein networks

The etiology of Parkinson's disease (PD) is partially understood. Some have indicated the role of concentration of iron in midbrain of affected individuals. Accordingly, looking into iron-binding proteins and antioxidant activity such as lactoferrin (LTF) may shed some lights into missing puzzles of PD. LTF association with PD-associated protein was investigated in human, chimpanzee, bovine, horse, sheep, chicken, mouse, rat, dog, one and two humped camels. In silico analysis of protein interaction network (PIN) was used to better establish the relationship with the disease. According to STRING facilities in finding interaction between proteins in different species, no pairwise interactions (edges) were found between LTF with PD-associated proteins except of bovine and chicken. SNCA (Alpha-synuclein) was related to bovine LTF and PD signaling pathways. In bovine, more than 85 proteins were associated to PD mostly mitochondrial resident. The network density, network diameter and clustering coefficient of the PIN for PD-associated proteins in bovine were 0.065, 9 and 0.381, respectively. The based on network analysis, we identified hub protein and high-degree protein for NDUFB4 and NDUFAB1, respectively. Those couples of them belonged to ubiquinone. It was concluded that bovine LTF is one of the major proteins in initiation of signaling to PD-associated proteins.