Literature-curated protein interaction datasets

An essential component of systems biology is discovery of the network of all possible physical protein-protein interactions (PPIs), the “interactome” network1-3. There are two complementary ways to obtain comprehensive PPI information. One is to systematically test all pairwise combinations of protein pairs for physical interactions at proteome-scale with a high-throughput assay3. The alternative is to curate all publications in the literature, each describing one (or a few) PPI(s) assayed at low-throughput4, then making the curation accessible in interaction databases. As neither strategy is yet able to come close to discovering the full interactome5-7, the matter arises as to which strategy can best fill in the missing pieces.