Critical assessment of sequence-based protein-protein interaction prediction methods that do not require homologous protein sequences

Background  

Protein-protein interactions underlie many important biological processes. Computational prediction methods can nicely complement experimental approaches for identifying protein-protein interactions. Recently, a unique category of sequence-based prediction methods has been put forward - unique in the sense that it does not require homologous protein sequences. This enables it to be universally applicable to all protein sequences unlike many of previous sequence-based prediction methods. If effective as claimed, these new sequence-based, universally applicable prediction methods would have far-reaching utilities in many areas of biology research.