Building protein-protein interaction networks with proteomics and informatics tools.

The systematic characterization of the whole interactomes of different model organisms has revealed that the eukaryotic proteome is highly interconnected. Therefore, biological research is progressively shifting away from classical approaches that focus only on a few proteins toward whole protein interaction networks to describe the relationship of proteins in biological processes. In this minireview, we survey the most common methods for the systematic identification of protein interactions and exemplify different strategies for the generation of protein interaction networks. In particular, we will focus on the recent development of protein interaction networks derived from quantitative proteomics data sets.