Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on May 5, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(Web Server issue):W369-W375; doi:10.1093/nar/gkp309
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. suppl_2 W369-W375
© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Articles |
PPISearch: a web server for searching homologous protein–protein interactions across multiple species
1Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, 2Department of Biological Science and Technology and 3Core Facility for Structural Bioinformatics, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 30050, Taiwan
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: 886 3 571212 56942; Fax: 886 3 5729288; Email: moon{at}faculty.nctu.edu.tw
Received March 4, 2009. Revised April 13, 2009. Accepted April 15, 2009.
As an increasing number of reliable protein–protein interactions (PPIs) become available and high-throughput experimental methods provide systematic identification of PPIs, there is a growing need for fast and accurate methods for discovering homologous PPIs of a newly determined PPI. PPISearch is a web server that rapidly identifies homologous PPIs (called PPI family) and infers transferability of interacting domains and functions of a query protein pair. This server first identifies two homologous families of the query, respectively, by using BLASTP to scan an annotated PPIs database (290 137 PPIs in 576 species), which is a collection of five public databases. We determined homologous PPIs from protein pairs of homologous families when these protein pairs were in the annotated database and have significant joint sequence similarity (E 
10–40) with the query. Using these homologous PPIs across multiple species, this sever infers the conserved domain–domain pairs (Pfam and InterPro domains) and function pairs (Gene Ontology annotations). Our results demonstrate that the transferability of conserved domain-domain pairs between homologous PPIs and query pairs is 88% using 103 762 PPI queries, and the transferability of conserved function pairs is 69% based on 106 997 PPI queries. The PPISearch server should be useful for searching homologous PPIs and PPI families across multiple species. The PPISearch server is available through the website at http://gemdock.life.nctu.edu.tw/ppisearch/.