A Bridging Centrality Plugin for GEPHI and a Case Study for Mycobacterium Tuberculosis H37Rv

Bridging Centrality (BriCe) is a popular measure that combines the Betweenness centrality and Bridging coefficient metrics to characterize nodes acting as a bridge among clusters. However, there were no implementations of the BriCe plugin that can be readily used in the GEPHI software or any other software dedicated to graph-based studies. In this paper, we present the BriCe plugin for GEPHI. It is available as a third-party functionality from the native GEPHI interface as a handy plugin to add; hence, no additional download and installation process is necessary. The BriCe plugin for GEPHI is open-source, and one can access the code through the GEPHI GitHub repository. As a use case of the BriCe plugin, we analyzed the genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv to identify biological explanations on why some proteins were ranked with top BriCe values? For instance, we were able to formulate a new hypothesis combining the predicted sub cellular localization and high BriCe values concerning lipopolysaccharides (LPS) exportation. Our hypothesis provides a possible link among proteins of a glycosyltransferase group and the type VII Secretion System. The Bridging Centrality plugin for GEPHI is an easy to use tool for analyzing complex graphs and draw novel insights from graphical data.