Large-scale prediction of protein-protein interactions from structures

Background  

The prediction of protein-protein interactions is an important step toward the elucidation of protein functions and the understanding of the molecular mechanisms inside the cell. While experimental methods for identifying these interactions remain costly and often noisy, the increasing quantity of solved 3D protein structures suggests that in silico methods to predict interactions between two protein structures will play an increasingly important role in screening candidate interacting pairs. Approaches using the knowledge of the structure are presumably more accurate than those based on sequence only. Approaches based on docking protein structures solve a variant of this problem, but these methods remain very computationally intensive and will not scale in the near future to the detection of interactions at the level of an interactome, involving millions of candidate pairs of proteins.