Model the evolution of protein interaction network assisted with protein age

•Proteins preferentially attach to proteins with the same age.•ADD model conform to some topology properties of yeast protein interaction network.•IADD model decompose an observed network backwards with good accuracy.

Understanding the dynamic evolutionary process of protein interaction network is fundamental to study cell's activity. As an important attribute of proteins, their age can provide heuristic information for studying the evolution of protein interaction network. In this paper an age-dependent duplication-divergence model (ADD) is proposed to model the evolutionary process of protein interaction network, which integrates the age information of proteins into duplication-divergence (DD) model. Moreover, we also reverse protein interaction network with our model, which is named as inverse age-dependent duplication-divergence model (IADD). The results show that the network built by ADD model conforms to the yeast protein interaction network in the interaction density pattern and other topological properties. The protein age groups predicted by IADD model also show a high agreement with existing research results.