Deciphering Protein–Protein Interactions. Part II. Computational Methods to Predict Protein and Domain Interaction Partners

Recent advances in high-throughput experimental methods for the identification of protein interactions have resulted in a large amount of diverse data that are somewhat incomplete and contradictory. As valuable as they are, such experimental approaches studying protein interactomes have certain limitations that can be complemented by the computational methods for predicting protein interactions. In this review we describe different approaches to predict protein interaction partners as well as highlight recent achievements in the prediction of specific domains mediating protein-protein interactions. We discuss the applicability of computational methods to different types of prediction problems and point out limitations common to all of them

AtPID: Arabidopsis thaliana protein interactome database—an integrative platform for plant systems biology

Arabidopsis thaliana Protein Interactome Database (AtPID) is an object database that integrates data from several bioinformatics prediction methods and manually collected information from the literature. It contains data relevant to protein–protein interaction, protein subcellular location, ortholog maps, domain attributes and gene regulation. The predicted protein interaction data were obtained from ortholog interactome, microarray profiles, GO annotation, and conserved domain and genome contexts. This database holds 28 062 protein–protein interaction pairs with 23 396 pairs generated from prediction methods. Among the rest 4666 pairs, 3866 pairs of them involving 1875 proteins were manually curated from the literature and 800 pairs were from enzyme complexes in KEGG. In addition, subcellular location information of 5562 proteins is available. AtPID was built via an intuitive query interface that provides easy access to the important features of proteins. Through the incorporation of both experimental and computational methods, AtPID is a rich source of information for system-level understanding of gene function and biological processes in A. thaliana. Public access to the AtPID database is available at http://atpid.biosino.org/

Frequent Pattern Finding in Integrated Biological Networks

Biomedical research is undergoing a revolution with the advance of high-throughput technologies. A major challenge in the post-genomic era is to understand how genes, proteins and small molecules are organized into signaling pathways and regulatory networks. To simplify the analysis of large complex molecular networks, strategies are sought to break them down into small yet relatively independent network modules, e.g. pathways and protein complexes. In fulfillment of the motivation to find evolutionary origins of network modules, a novel strategy has been developed to uncover duplicated pathways and protein complexes. This search was first formulated into a computational problem which finds frequent patterns in integrated graphs. The whole framework was then successfully implemented as the software package BLUNT, which includes a parallelized version. To evaluate the biological significance of the work, several large datasets were chosen, with each dataset targeting a different biological question. An application of BLUNT was performed on the yeast protein-protein interaction network, which is described. A large number of frequent patterns were discovered and predicted to be duplicated pathways. To explore how these pathways may have diverged since duplication, the differential regulation of duplicated pathways was studied at the transcriptional level, both in terms of time and location. As demonstrated, this algorithm can be used as new data mining tool for large scale biological data in general. It also provides a novel strategy to study the evolution of pathways and protein complexes in a systematic way. Understanding how pathways and protein complexes evolve will greatly benefit the fundamentals of biomedical research

Discovering Domain-Domain Interactions toward Genome-Wide Protein Interaction and Function Predictions

To fully understand the underlying mechanisms of living cells, it is essential to delineate the intricate interactions between the cell proteins at a genome scale. Insights into the protein functions will enrich our understanding in human diseases and contribute to future drug developments. My dissertation focuses on the development and optimization of machine learning algorithms to study protein-protein interactions and protein function annotations through discovery of domain-domain interactions. First of all, I developed a novel domain-based random decision forest framework (RDFF) that explored all possible domain module pairs in mediating protein interactions. RDFF achieved higher sensitivity (79.78%) and specificity (64.38%) in interaction predictions of S. cerevisiae proteins compared to the popular Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach. RDFF can also infer interactions for both single-domain pairs and domain module pairs. Secondly, I proposed cross-species interacting domain patterns (CSIDOP) approach that not only increased fidelity of existing functional annotations, but also proposed novel annotations for unknown proteins. CSIDOP accurately determined functions for 95.42% of proteins in H. sapiens using 2,972 GO `molecular function' terms. In contrast, most existing methods can only achieve accuracies of 50% to 75% using much smaller number of categories. Additionally, we were able to assign novel annotations to 181 unknown H. sapiens proteins. Finally, I implemented a web-based system, called PINFUN, which enables users to make online protein-protein interaction and protein function predictions based on a large-scale collection of known and putative domain interactions

Architecture of basic building blocks in protein and domain structural interaction networks

Motivation: The structural interaction of proteins and their domains in networks is one of the most basic molecular mechanisms for biological cells. Topological analysis of such networks can provide an understanding of and solutions for predicting properties of proteins and their evolution in terms of domains. A single paradigm for the analysis of interactions at different layers, such as domain and protein layers, is needed. Results: Applying a colored vertex graph model, we integrated two basic interaction layers under a unified model: (1) structural domains and (2) their protein/complex networks. We identified four basic and distinct elements in the model that explains protein interactions at the domain level. We searched for motifs in the networks to detect their topological characteristics using a pruning strategy and a hash table for rapid detection. We obtained the following results: first, compared with a random distribution, a substantial part of the protein interactions could be explained by domain-level structural interaction information. Second, there were distinct kinds of protein interaction patterns classified by specific and distinguishable numbers of domains. The intermolecular domain interaction was the most dominant protein interaction pattern. Third, despite the coverage of the protein interaction information differing among species, the similarity of their networks indicated shared architectures of protein interaction network in living organisms. Remarkably, there were only a few basic architectures in the model (> 10 for a 4-node network topology), and we propose that most biological combinations of domains into proteins and complexes can be explained by a small number of key topological motifsclose162