Seminars

Predicting protein-protein interactions is critical for understanding cellular processes. Because protein domains represent binding modules and are responsible for the interactions between proteins, several computational approaches have been proposed to predict protein interactions at the domain level. The fact that protein domains are likely evolutionarily conserved allows us to pool information from data across multiple organisms for the inference of domain-domain and protein-protein interactions. In this talk, we present our results on estimating domain-domain interaction probabilities through integrating large-scale protein interaction data from three organisms, yeast, worms, and fruit flies. The estimated domain-domain interaction probabilities can be then used to predict protein-protein interactions in a given organism. Based on a thorough comparison of sensitivity and specificity, and other analyses, the proposed approaches have better performance due to their ability to borrow information from multiple species, and the estimated domain-domain interaction probabilities can also be informative in predicting protein-protein interaction in other organisms. This is joint work with Inyoung Kim and Yin Liu.