Protein complex analysis: From raw protein lists to protein interaction networks.

The elucidation of molecular interaction networks is one of the pivotal challenges in the study of biology. Affinity purification-mass spectrometry and other co-complex methods have become widely employed experimental techniques to identify protein complexes. These techniques typically suffer from a high number of false negatives and false positive contaminants due to technical shortcomings and purification biases. To support a diverse range of experimental designs and approaches, a large number of computational methods have been proposed to filter, infer and validate protein interaction networks from experimental pull-down MS data. Nevertheless, this expansion of available methods complicates the selection of the most optimal ones to support systems biology-driven knowledge extraction. In this review, we give an overview of the most commonly used computational methods to process and interpret co-complex results, and we discuss the issues and unsolved problems that still exist within the field.