Further highlighting the impact of Tax and HBZ in the initiation and maintenance of cancer, these viral proteins exhibit significantly more PPIs (at least 20 times) than the average "degree" (number of interactors) of known cancer gene products (Fig 1F), or other tumor virus proteins, but comparable to highly connected cancer gene products such as CREB3L1 [24], or HPV viral proteins E6 and E7 [23]. Here, CREB3L1 is linked to cancer.