Prediction of protein-protein interactions: the CAPRI experiment, its evaluation and implications.

Given the increasing interest in protein-protein interactions, the prediction of these interactions from sequence and structural information has become a booming activity. CAPRI, the community-wide experiment for assessing blind predictions of protein-protein interactions, is playing an important role in fostering progress in docking procedures. At the same time, novel methods are being derived for predicting regions of a protein that are likely to interact and for characterizing putative intermolecular contacts from sequence and structural data. Together with docking procedures, these methods provide an integrated computational approach that should be a valuable complement to genome-scale experimental studies of protein-protein interactions.