Whole-proteome interaction mining

A major post-genomic scientific and technological pursuit is to describe the functions performed by the proteins encoded by the genome. One strategy is to first identify the protein-protein interactions in a proteome, then determine pathways and overall structure relating these interactions, and finally to statistically infer functional roles of individual proteins. Although huge amounts of genomic data are at hand, current experimental protein interaction assays must overcome technical problems to scale-up for high-throughput analysis. In the meantime, bioinformatics approaches may help bridge the information gap required for inference of protein function. In this paper, a previously described data mining approach to prediction of protein-protein interactions (Bock and Gough, 2001, Bioinformatics, 17, 455-460) is extended to interaction mining on a proteome-wide scale. An algorithm (the phylogenetic bootstrap) is introduced, which suggests traversal of a phenogram, interleaving rounds of computation and experiment, to develop a knowledge base of protein interactions in genetically-similar organisms.