Due to the sale-free and small-world characters of Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) network data

current clustering algorithms did not perform well.According to the topological structural characters of PPI networks

this paper proposed an ant colony optimization clustering algorithm based on joint strength (JSACO).This method modified the pickup/drop rules of ACO algorithm by means of introducing the concept of joint strength

which regarded the joint strength as pickup rule to cluster the protein nodes.In addition

the protein nodes which had the low joint strength were abandoned in accordance with drop rule and the final clustering result was obtained.Finally the PPI data in MIPS database was used to test the algorithm and the clustering result was compared with other PPI clustering methods.The simulation results show that JSACO algorithm performs better in terms of precision value and consumes less time.