1,721,230 research outputs found

    Comparative interactomics: comparing apples and pears?

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    The study of the complex web of interactions that link biological molecules in a cell is the subject of interactomics - currently one of the fastest moving fields in molecular biology. The recent completion of high-throughput studies to investigate systematically all the possible interactions in a variety of model organisms has provided unique opportunities to compare interaction networks and ask questions about their conservation during evolution. It is expected that this approach will yield a scientific return as rich as that obtained in the past decade from comparing genomes and proteomes from different organisms. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

    Combining phosphoproteomics datasets and literature information to reveal the functional connections in a cell phosphorylation network

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    Protein phosphorylation modulates many biological processes. However, the characterization of the complex regulatory circuits underlying cell response to external and internal stimuli is still limited by our inability to describe the phosphorylation network on a global scale. Modern MS-based phosphoproteomics allows monitoring tens of thousands of phosphorylation sites in multiple conditions, making the approach ideal to explore signaling pathways mediated by phosphorylation. Here, we review recent advances in phosphoproteomics and discuss some of the computational approaches developed to facilitate extraction of signaling information from these datasets. Finally, this review focuses on approaches that integrate prior literature information with unbiased phosphoproteomics experiments

    Domains mediate protein-protein interactions and nucleate protein assemblies.

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    Cell physiology is governed by an intricate mesh of physical and functional links among proteins, nucleic acids and other metabolites. The recent information flood coming from large-scale genomic and proteomic approaches allows us to foresee the possibility of compiling an exhaustive list of the molecules present within a cell, enriched with quantitative information on concentration and cellular localization. Moreover, several high-throughput experimental and computational techniques have been devised to map all the protein interactions occurring in a living cell. So far, such maps have been drawn as graphs where nodes represent proteins and edges represent interactions. However, this representation does not take into account the intrinsically modular nature of proteins and thus fails in providing an effective description of the determinants of binding. Since proteins are composed of domains that often confer on proteins their binding capabilities, a more informative description of the interaction network would detail, for each pair of interacting proteins in the network, which domains mediate the binding. Understanding how protein domains combine to mediate protein interactions would allow one to add important features to the protein interaction network, making it possible to discriminate between simultaneously occurring and mutually exclusive interactions. This objective can be achieved by experimentally characterizing domain recognition specificity or by analyzing the frequency of co-occurring domains in proteins that do interact. Such approaches allow gaining insights on the topology of complexes with unknown three-dimensional structure, thus opening the prospect of adopting a more rational strategy in developing drugs designed to selectively target specific protein interactions

    VirusMentha: a new resource for virus-host protein interactions

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    Viral infections often cause diseases by perturbing several cellular processes in the infected host. Viral proteins target host proteins and either form new complexes or modulate the formation of functional host complexes. Describing and understanding the perturbation of the host interactome following viral infection is essential for basic virology and for the development of antiviral therapies. In order to provide a general overview of such interactions, a few years ago we developed VirusMINT. We have now extended the scope and coverage of VirusMINT and established VirusMentha, a new virus-virus and virus-host interaction resource build on the detailed curation protocols of the IMEx consortium and on the integration strategies developed for mentha. VirusMentha is regularly and automatically updated every week by capturing, via the PSICQUIC protocol, interactions curated by five different databases that are part of the IMEx consortium. VirusMentha can be freely browsed at http://virusmentha.uniroma2.it/ and its complete data set is available for download

    Assembling disease networks from causal interaction resources

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    The development of high-throughput high-content technologies and the increased ease in their application in clinical settings has raised the expectation of an important impact of these technologies on diagnosis and personalized therapy. Patient genomic and expression profiles yield lists of genes that are mutated or whose expression is modulated in specific disease conditions. The challenge remains of extracting from these lists functional information that may help to shed light on the mechanisms that are perturbed in the disease, thus setting a rational framework that may help clinical decisions. Network approaches are playing an increasing role in the organization and interpretation of patients' data. Biological networks are generated by connecting genes or gene products according to experimental evidence that demonstrates their interactions. Till recently most approaches have relied on networks based on physical interactions between proteins. Such networks miss an important piece of information as they lack details on the functional consequences of the interactions. Over the past few years, a number of resources have started collecting causal information of the type protein A activates/inactivates protein B, in a structured format. This information may be represented as signed directed graphs where physiological and pathological signaling can be conveniently inspected. In this review we will (i) present and compare these resources and discuss the different scope in comparison with pathway resources; (ii) compare resources that explicitly capture causality in terms of data content and proteome coverage (iii) review how causal-graphs can be used to extract disease-specific Boolean networks
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