Web-Based Computational System for Protein-Protein Interaction Inference

Recently, high-throughput technologies such as the two-hybrid system, protein chip, Mass Spectrometry, and the phage display have furnished a lot of data on protein-protein interactions (PPIs), but the data has not been accurate so far and the quantity has also been limited. In this respect, computational techniques for the prediction and validation of PPIs have been developed. However, existing computational methods do not take into account the fact that a PPI is actually originated from the interactions of domains that each protein contains. So, in this work, the information on domain modules of individual proteins has been employed in order to find out the protein interaction relationship. The system developed here, WASPI (Web-based Assistant System for Protein-protein interaction Inference), has been implemented to provide many functional insights into the protein interactions and their domains. To achieve those objectives, several preprocessing steps have been taken. First, the domain module information of interacting proteins was extracted by taking advantage of the InterPro database, which includes protein families, domains, and functional sites. The InterProScan program was used in this preprocess. Second, the homology comparison with the GO (Gene Ontology) and COG (Clusters of Orthologous Groups) with an E-value of $10^{-5}$, $10^{-3}$ respectively, was employed to obtain the information on the function and annotation of each interacting protein of a secondary PPI database in the WASPI. The BLAST program was utilized for the homology comparison.