Sharif Digital Repository

Removal or suppression of key proteins in an essential pathway of a pathogen is expected to disrupt the pathway and prohibit the pathogen from performing a vital function. Thus disconnecting multiple essential pathways should disrupt the survival of a pathogen even when it has multiple pathways to drug resistance. We consider a scenario where the drug-resistance pathways are unknown. To disrupt these pathways, we consider a cut set S of G, where G is a connected simple graph representing the protein interaction network of the pathogen, so that G-S splits to two partitions such that the endpoints of each pathway are in different partitions. If the difference between the sizes of the two...