Genomics and Proteomics

Protein Interactions in Biology

Decades of research into cell biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, structural biology, and biophysics have produced a remarkable compendium of knowledge on the function and molecular properties of individual proteins. This knowledge is well recorded and manually curated into major protein databases like UniProt. However, proteins rarely act alone. Many times they team up into “molecular machines” and have intricate physicochemical dynamic connections to undertake biological functions at both cellular and systems levels. A critical step towards unraveling the complex molecular relationships in living systems is the mapping of protein-to-protein physical “interactions”. The complete map of protein interactions that can occur in a living organism is called the interactome. Interactome mapping has become one of the main scopes of current biological research, similar to the way “genome” projects were a driving force of molecular biology 20 years ago.