Background: A global map of protein-protein interactions in cellular systems provides key insights into the workings of an organism. A repository of well-validated high-quality protein-protein interactions can be used in both large- and small-scale studies to generate and validate a wide range of functional hypotheses.

Results: We develop HINT (http://hint.yulab.org) - a database of high-quality protein-protein interactomes for human, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, and Oryza sativa. These were collected from several databases and filtered both systematically and manually to remove low-quality/erroneous interactions. The resulting datasets are classified by type (binary physical interactions vs. co-complex associations) and data source (high-throughput systematic setups vs. literature-curated small-scale experiments). We find strong sociological sampling biases in literature-curated datasets of small-scale interactions. An interactome without such sampling biases was used to understand network properties of human disease-genes - hubs are unlikely to cause disease, but if they do, they usually cause multiple disorders.

Conclusions: HINT is of significant interest to researchers in all fields of biology as it addresses the ubiquitous need of having a repository of high-quality protein-protein interactions. These datasets can be utilized to generate specific hypotheses about specific proteins and/or pathways, as well as analyzing global properties of cellular networks. HINT will be regularly updated and all versions will be tracked.

• PMID: 22846459
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Journal Article | Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

Authors

Das J, Yu H

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